Mendelssohn & Grieg: String Quartets

Norwegian-Swedish quartet Opus13 takes its name from Mendelssohn's youthful, Beethoven-haunted String Quartet in A minor, Op. 13 — the very piece its four founding members first played together as teenagers in Oslo. Mendelssohn & Grieg: String Quartets, their debut recording at Alpha Classics, pairs that formative work with Grieg's turbulent String Quartet No. 1, Op. 27, plus a transcription of Solveig's Song, tracing a compelling arc from Mendelssohn's precocious 1827 dialogue with the late Beethoven quartets to Grieg's 1877–78 crisis-born masterpiece, composed as his marriage to Nina nearly collapsed. Both works share a striking structural device: each borrows a melodic motif from one of the composer's own songs (Mendelssohn's Frage, Grieg's Spillemænd) and threads it through the entire quartet as a kind of musical question posed and eventually answered. Opus13 — First Prize winners at the 2025 Wigmore Hall Borletti-Buitoni Award and Bordeaux International String Quartet Competition — perform on an exceptional set of loaned instruments, including a 1736 Stradivarius and a 1751 Guadagnini. Recorded at Lillehammer Church in Norway with support from BBC Radio 3's New Generation Artist scheme, the album captures a young ensemble bringing real interpretive depth to two intensely personal, emotionally loaded works.Norwegian-Swedish quartet Opus13 takes its name from Mendelssohn's youthful, Beethoven-haunted String Quartet in A minor, Op. 13 — the very piece its four founding members first played together as teenagers in Oslo. This debut recording pairs that formative work with Grieg's turbulent String Quartet No. 1, Op. 27, plus a transcription of Solveig's Song, tracing a compelling arc from Mendelssohn's precocious 1827 dialogue with the late Beethoven quartets to Grieg's 1877–78 crisis-born masterpiece, composed as his marriage to Nina nearly collapsed. Both works share a striking structural device: each borrows a melodic motif from one of the composer's own songs (Mendelssohn's Frage, Grieg's Spillemænd) and threads it through the entire quartet as a kind of musical question posed and eventually answered. Opus13 — First Prize winners at the 2025 Wigmore Hall Borletti-Buitoni Award and Bordeaux International String Quartet Competition — perform on an exceptional set of loaned instruments, including a 1736 Stradivarius and a 1751 Guadagnini. Recorded at Lillehammer Church in Norway with support from BBC Radio 3's New Generation Artist scheme, the album captures a young ensemble bringing real interpretive depth to two intensely personal, emotionally loaded works.

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Opus13 Sonoko Miriam Welde, Violin Edvard Erdal, Violin Albin Uusijärvi, Viola Daniel Thorell, Cello