String Quartet Op.18 No. 2 in G - Beethoven

Five Movements for String Quartet, Op.5 - Webern

Tuned in Fits (2000) - Kevin O'Connell

String Quartet No.3 in A, Op.41 No.3 - Schumann

By the happiest of coincidences there have been two performances of Beethoven's Op. 18/2, two performances of works by Webern and two new works by Kevin O'Connell all in the last fortnight. It is fascinating to see how the same notes can change in meaning, depending on who plays them.

On Tuesday last the Hugo Wolf Quartet, in Dublin on the second stage of their Irish tour for Music Network/ESB, emphasised the playful aspects of Beethoven's Muse by not becoming too involved in the darker undercurrents. It could have been a different work from the one performed recently by the Lotus Quartet.

Webern's ability to cram into a few minutes more than others can say in hours never ceases to astonish. It almost seems that the fewer the notes and the barer the textures the more compelling the music. The performance kept one continually aware of the infinite suggestiveness to be found in this music where a single pizzicato note can stand for a whole extended cadence.

Tuned in Fits is a sort of footnote to O'Connell's massive Quartet: it shares the earlier work's sound-world and immense seriousness. The composer introduced it as a fairly light-hearted scherzo; it might have seemed such had it been flanked by even weightier movements but on its own it was a scherzo without a home and far too grave to be used to fill a slot in a concert.

Schumann, writing in the centre of the 19th century, before romanticism collapsed under its own weight, wrote for the string quartet with the same passion that he brought to his piano works; the Hugo Wolf channelled the flood of feeling into a powerful declamation that had an almost orchestral richness.