Ludwig van Beethoven: String Quartets Nos. 10 & 11

This, the third in the series of Beethoven’s late quartets from the Ehnes Quartet deviates from the official ‘late’ works to include the last two of Beethoven’s ‘middle period’ quartets. The sunny and amiable E flat, known as the ‘Harp’, and the terse and irascible F Minor known, not surprisingly, as ‘Serioso’. Beethoven had a habit of working on two works of wildly differing emotional ranges at the same time – never more clearly illustrated than in these two masterly quartets.