Stenhammar Quartet: Aho

The Strad Issue: March 2025

Description: Fascinating youthful forays into the quartet genre

Musicians: Stenhammar Quartet

Works: Aho: String Quartets nos.1–3

Catalogue number: BIS BIS-2069 (SACD)

With their proudly worn influences from earlier music – Bach, Brahms, Britten, for example, but above all, Shostakovich – it’s perhaps tempting to dismiss the three early string quartets that Finnish composer Kalevi Aho wrote while still at school and at Helsinki’s Sibelius Academy as mere student exercises. But there’s already a thoroughly distinctive, eloquent voice emerging in these works from his late teens and early twenties, one that the Stockholm-based Stenhammar Quartet captures unerringly in passionate performances that make a strong case for the quartets’ drama and deep emotion.

The Stenhammar players expertly convey the Second Quartet’s shifting moods, from its despairing, Shostakovichian opening (given a particularly cool, reedy account) to the warmth of its lyrical finale. They really embrace the almost orchestral richness of the Third Quartet too – cast in eight short, continuous movements, and charting a cathartic journey from innocence to experience – and they discover a clear line of intent threaded through the somewhat disparate ideas and textures of its episodic structure.

The Stenhammar musicians might have less to work with in the somewhat more derivative First Quartet – written by the self-taught Aho as an 18-year-old schoolboy – but they’re nonetheless faithful to its high drama and rich imagination. Recorded sound is close and authentic, but it also captures the performers’ breathing a little distractingly at times.

DAVID KETTLE