Wihan Quartet

The Summer Music Festival continued with a beefy programme in a rather gorgeous setting: Jesus College Chapel.

The Wihan Quartet are four amazingly talented players from the Czech Republic and their music seems steeped in all things Bohemian and Moravian. Their sound is full, rich and strong with a marvellous attention to balance and phrasing. They produce music of a strong vibrant colour like a bountiful Prague spring and they set the old chapel alight with the fervour of their music.

First up was Haydn's Lark Quartet with its evocations of that soaring bird - a piece by turns charming, humorous, dark and demonic: the last movement was played at breakneck speed and sounded like a demented hornpipe - exciting stuff. Haydn was followed by Beethoven - his Op 95 Quartet, the Serioso. The boys in black produced a terrific sound - full of energy, power and the many turn-on-a-pin changes in mood that the old master demands in this middle-period quartet. The Wihan pulled no punches and let out all the stops in this great work which by some miracle of musical magic sounded thoroughly Czech.

The final piece (as per programme) was appropriately enough, a work by the Czech master Dvorak, his American Quartet (Op 96). As you might expect, this was a wonderfully confident reading - full of light and shade re-creating Dvořák's gorgeous sound world.

Not for nothing is this one of the repertoire's most famous and accessible string quartets. It is soaked in Dvořák's admiration for American folk music and his barely concealed melancholy at being so far from home (it was composed in Iowa). The chaps ended a great night of music with a slow movement from a Haydn quartet - the one with the original Deutschland über alles, played here as a set of ever fascinating variations. It was a wonderful end to a splendid concert.

The Wihan Quartet played at the Jesus College Chapel in Cambridge on Wednesday 22nd July 2009 as part of the Cambridge Summer Music Festival

Photograph by Wolf Marloh