Quatuor Agate owe their name to Brahms – taking it from Agathe von Siebold, to whom he had been engaged and whose name he embedded in his G major string sextet Op 36 – so it’s appropriate that the Paris-based group’s debut recording should be of Brahms’s three string quartets. Since they formed in 2016, the Agate have won a number of prizes and awards, including one from the Young Classical Artists Trust in London, and hearing their warm, wonderfully refined sound, impeccable intonation and punctilious attention to detail, it’s easy to understand why they have made such an impression.
Those qualities are heard at their best in the second of Brahms’s Op 51 quartets, in A minor, whose generally relaxed demeanour suits the Agate’s suave playing very well, but it’s less effective in the first of the Op 51 set, in C minor, which surely needs a more aggressive edge than they allow it here. The cloudless good humour of the B major quartet Op 67, which Brahms himself dismissed as a “useless trifle”, is projected at face value; for all the technical excellence and beauties of the playing, one longs for a bit more grit and toughness, a bit more muscle, than these works show here.
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