Though affiliated to the South Bank, the Alban Berg Quartet aren't seen in the UK nearly often enough.
Not that seeing them is the main point. Take their instruments away and they would resemble a table of middle managers at an office Christmas dinner, glumly waiting for the wine to arrive. But, when performing the Classical and early Romantic works at the core of the quartet repertoire, they have few peers.
Their performance of Mozart's Quartet in D, K575, was proof of this. The first melody was all silvery sweetness, while the crisp chords punctuating it had a mischievous glint. When the Andante melody was passed from player to player you could have been tricked into thinking it came from just one instrument.
That's not to say they don't have distinctive tone, but that they know when to blend and when not to. At the moment of greatest tension in the finale, the four merged their lines into one chaotic, swirling mass, making their exit into the resolution all the more exhilarating.
The other two works were both love letters, in a way. Shostakovich wrote his amazingly condensed Seventh Quartet for what would have been his late first wife's 50th birthday. The piece began straightforwardly, biting but not yet bitter; eventually a chill was introduced with the second violin's winding accompaniment to the Lento. In the ensuing Allegro, though, a frenzy was reached so soon that it seemed there was nowhere else to go. Shostakovich's idiom didn't seem to come as naturally to the Bergs as Mozart's - his wit doesn't escape them, but perhaps his perversity is more elusive.
Janacek's Second Quartet, Intimate Letters, is one of several works tracing the composer's abiding passion for a married muse 40 years his junior. The quartet caught well the exuberance of the opening - Janacek said it represented the first sight of his beloved - but soon usurped it with some haunting, glassy sounds, playing with the bow very near to the bridge. Again, clarity rather than raw passion characterised this performance, though the second movement surged strongly.
The third movement from Debussy's quartet made a satisfying encore; it is with this lyricism, whether French or Germanic, that the Bergs seem truly comfortable, and the lone movement left us hankering for the other three.
