Music / Esmé Quartet, Llewellyn Hall, May 10. Reviewed by GRAHAM McDONALD

This is a very good string quartet. 

Formed eight years ago in Germany by four young Korean women, the viola player was replaced a year ago by a Belgian-American male musician of the same sort of age who would appear to fit in seamlessly. 

The program for this first Australian tour for Musica Viva, reflects the age of the musicians, with all four works written before the composers were 30.

There is a sense of utter professionalism about what they do. They walk on stage with their instruments in tune, they sit down and play. 

No fidgeting, no checking of the tuning, just straight into the slow opening of Anton Webern’s Langsamer Satz from 1905. This work slides through nine minutes of dense string writing before fading out gloriously at the end.

This was followed by Felix Mendelssohn’s String Quartet No 2, written when he was 18. There was a particularly neat finish to the second movement and a delightfully melodic short movement.

The second half of the concert began with Spiral Sequences, a two-movement quartet by Australian composer Jack Frerer, who now lives in the US. A most interesting work with the first movement full of shimmering long-held notes and repeated patterns. 

The long notes were reprised in the slower second movement, each ending on a crescendo while seemingly flung on to the next player before the work ended in another impossibly gentle finish.

The final work of the program was Claude Debussy’s String Quartet in G minor from 1893. The standout moment here was the powerful ending to the first movement where the strings were left to ring for exactly a beat or two before the start of the second movement. I have no idea if that timing is in Debussy’s score, but it was a very effective way to present the work and a fine ending to a most impressive concert.