String Quartet in D Minor

Having completed three string quartets between 1885 and 1890, Sibelius tackled the medium only once in his maturity. Begun in December 1908 and finished the following March, the “Voces intimae” String Quartet received its first performance in Helsinki on 25 April 1910, when it was met with guarded enthusiasm. Unusually, there are five movements. The first begins with a musing “Andante” that gains in assertiveness as it goes into a moderately paced “Allegro” of forceful rhetoric. Following without pause, the “Vivace” is less a scherzo than a coda to the foregoing, with its main ideas being rapidly reconfigured. The central “Adagio” ranks among Sibelius’ most profound statements, its searching eloquence twice interrupted with three quiet chords identified by the composer as the “intimate voices” of the work’s subtitle. The final two movements make for an imposing duality, the “Allegretto” with its trenchant rhythms and questing harmonies followed by an “Allegro” whose folk inflections propel the music to its exhilarating conclusion.