“the searing intensity of the Elias’s playing lays bare their shock value (of these Quartets) … Twenty years separate the two quartets, and what a distance he travelled in that time. Yet Op.13 was already an extraordinarily confident piece .. In the Elias’s reading there is a wonderful story-telling aspect to the Intermezzo … in the remarkable Quartet #6 Op.80 the Elias clearly have four powerful personalities at work – how much more they bring out the heart-stopping melodies that seem to flow so effortlessly – apt given that he wrote it in the wake of his sister Fanny’s death … melodies in such movements as the gentle, consolatory theme that opens the slow movement of the Sixth, or the second of the Four Pieces (Op.81)”(Gramophone)
Mendelssohn: String Quartets Op. 13 & Op. 80; 4 Pieces, Op. 81
