The London Haydn Quartet HAYDN String Quartets op. 64

‘He has taste, and the most profound knowledge of composition.’ It’s supremely fitting that Haydn paid his great tribute to Mozart at a quartet party, and there can’t be many chamber music lovers who haven’t tried to imagine what sort of playing Haydn actually heard that night in Vienna – and what that ‘taste’ represented. The question comes up again with the latest release in the London Haydn Quartet’s Haydn cycle for Hyperion. Reviewing the LHQ’s Op 50 set in 2016 I found their performances ‘civilised, carefully prepared and spacious to a T’, and nothing here makes me revise that. These are period-instrument performances, played from an early London edition. Development section repeats are observed, and tempos are on the broad side.

The impact of these choices is most marked in the B minor Quartet (No 2). The LHQ’s first movement is reflective and questioning, though I don’t think anyone could describe it (as Haydn does) as spiritoso. The Adagio goes to some genuinely deep places and the Minuet, taken at low speed, becomes a lilting, bittersweet pastorale. Well, Haydn contains multitudes, and while the group’s habit of stretching the top of a phrase gives the opening movement of No 4 a slightly seasick quality, it gives the brisker finales a genuinely improvisatory feeling. The finale of No 5 (the Lark) is often dispatched as a flashy moto perpetuo; here it breathes, and in doing so becomes a sort of gypsy dance.

Elsewhere, finales are crisply articulated with plenty of dancelike bounce – the final Prestos of Nos 1 and 6 being wonderfully buoyant cases in point. So there’s plenty of character here (the performance of the undervalued No 3 in B flat is particularly coherent and engaging) as well as many qualities which, again, will come down to taste. You might prefer a sweeter violin tone than Catherine Manson’s in the opening melody of the Lark; you might share my misgivings about the pungent vibrato-free portamentos and you might wish that the group had let the exquisite slow movements of Nos 4, 5 and 6 unfurl a little more songfully.

But this is domestic music, after all, and perhaps a certain amount of understatement actually enhances the boldness of Haydn’s invention. Hyperion’s recorded sound captures that small-room acoustic persuasively while still letting Jonathan Manson’s cello glow, and you do get the sense (more vital to Op 64 than the quartets that succeeded it) of this music being something understood between friends. There are bolder, funnier, more wildly imaginative accounts of this music out there but you never doubt the LHQ’s sincerity, or the validity of their approach. Once again, it’s a matter of taste. (Richard Bratby / Gramophone)