Following their scintillating accounts of the Grieg string quartet around the Highlands a couple years ago, the return of the Engegård String Quartet to Music Nairn was eagerly anticipated and it did not disappoint.  Their concert opened with Mozart's Bb Divertimento KV137, one of a group of such pieces from the composer's early Salzburg days all of which are experimental in structure and full of inventive ideas.  The group wisely chose to reshuffle the movements to place the lyrical Andante between two more animated ones, although it is worth observing that these proto-quartets predate the established string quartet structure.  The Engegårds gave us a revelatory account of this music, although I felt just occasionally they perhaps invested some of the composer's more lightweight ideas with an undue degree of intensity.

However, this quest for intensity came into its own in an extraordinary account of Janacek's String Quartet no 1 The Kreuzer Sonata – which references the Beethoven work of the title, but is named primarily for the novella of that name by Tolstoy which provides its narrative.  This tempestuous tale of envy, illicit romance and murder seems tailor-made for Janacek, and in an extraordinary raw and tortured piece he explores the emotions seething just under domestic surfaces.  The Engegårds brought his exceptional music to such a towering pitch of intensity that it left the audience as drained as the performers!  Unsettling ostinati and intentionally edgy and violent outbursts kept us on the edge of our seats.  I was intrigued to hear for the first time allusions to Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht, a work which also deals with romantic infidelity and which Janacek clearly wished to evoke.  This was a stunning performance and for me the highlight of the concert.

The group opened the second half with a work they commissioned in 2011 from Maja Ratkye, during a time when the shadow of terrorism first fell across Norway.  A work of considerable nervous energy, and also alluding to Beethoven in the form of his opus 59 Quartet no 1, Ratkye's A Tale of Lead and Light was in an avant garde idiom which I have to say on one listening I found largely elusive.  Full marks to the Engegårds for programming this challenging piece, a work which they clearly believe in as performers.

Felix Mendelssohn's beloved sister Fanny is becoming more celebrated as a composer in her own right, and her String Quartet in Eb of 1829 is both characterful and pleasingly lyrical.  While I stop short of the opinion I have heard voiced that Fanny is the equal of her extraordinarily talented brother, this is music that deserves to be heard, individual in character and form, elegantly conceived and beautifully crafted.  Felix was said to have been surprisingly dismissive of his sister's quartet, but similarities between the falling opening theme of the Adagio and important declamatory phrases in Felix's Elijah, composed in the final year of Fanny's life, may be some form of belated homage from brother to sister.  The Engegårds warmed to the lyricism of Fanny's writing and gave us a beautiful account of her only string quartet, one of the first to be written by a woman.  Warm and extended applause from a large audience for this eclectic and stunningly executed programme, gave the Engegårds the excuse to send us skipping home with a toe-tapping performance of Norwegian folk music, Skotsk fra Lom i Gudbrandsdalen, a scottische from Lom in central Norway.