Music Nairn continued their admirable tradition of discovering excellent new ensembles to delight us with their superlative music-making, presenting the Marmen Quartet.  Since their foundation in 2013, this group has garnered numerous plaudits, and within moments of their opening account of the Ravel String Quartet it became apparent why.  Ranging in dynamics from a whispering pianissimo to a wonderfully percussive fortissimo, the quartet evoked Ravel's limpid almost louche textures and languid melodies as well as his more frenetic moods with equal assurance.  This was playing of breathtaking technical ease and musicality, producing one of the most convincing accounts of this intensely atmospheric music that I have ever heard.  All four players fully inhabited Ravel's mercurial world of shifting textures and changing ambiences with a breathtaking unanimity of purpose and execution.

The six string quartets by the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok are famously challenging for performers and audience alike, and while the third Quartet (1927) kept us on our mettle, the players didn't even seem stretched technically, devoting all their energy to a blistering interpretation of this haunting, abrasive and energetic music.  Listening to Bartok's music in the hands of these masterly players it struck me that the first half of this continuous piece has more to do with the nightmarish world of Viennese Angst encountered in the music of the serial music of Schoenberg and Webern than with his native Hungarian tradition, which Bartok tapped into so vividly elsewhere.  Only in the second half of the piece are we made more aware of the composer's folk roots, albeit in a harmonically distorted form.  The thrilling bravura of the Marmens' account carried us on a wonderfully eventful musical adventure.

Placing a Mozart Quartet as the second half, and therefore the 'main feature' of their concert was a little unorthodox, although how else would you have ordered this ambitious programme?  The Quartet K465, referred to as 'The Dissonance' in reference to the adventurous harmonic progressions in its slow introduction, is a substantial work belonging to the set of six quartets dedicated to Haydn.  The dedication to Mozart's musical hero and guru and the fact that Mozart's father, with whom the composer had a famously complex relationship, played second violin to his son in the premiere performance in front of Haydn both help to explain the harmonic daring of the introduction and the apparent compositional facility of the rest of the piece - the twenty-nine-year-old Mozart is clearly aiming to catch the attention of and then thoroughly impress the two older men.  In fact after the daring introduction, K465 is a relatively conventional work, although at the same time superbly entertaining and imaginative.  Placing it in the spotlight is not without its hazards, as there is perhaps a temptation to over-interpret - it has to be said that I was probably alone in feeling that a couple of features in the Marmens' interpretation, such as the regular portamenti and the frequent 'pulling around' of tempi, sounded inappropriately 'romantic'.  However, these reservations were more than compensated for by the sheer passion and intelligence of the playing, while the decision to present these three towering masterpieces in the order they did was more than vindicated.  A capacity audience expressed their enjoyment of this outstanding concert with an extended and well-deserved ovation.