Exuberance and class: Ariadne auf Naxos at Edinburgh Festival reviewed

For some reason, I’d got it into my head that the main work in the Gringolts Quartet’s midday recital at the Edinburgh Festival was going to be Beethoven’s Quartet in C sharp minor, Op.131. No problem with that, of course; it’s exactly the sort of big serious work you’d expect a big serious international violin soloist like Ilya Gringolts to play when he forms a string quartet, and then to bring on tour to a big serious international festival like Edinburgh. Still, it’s not a piece that you can really listen to before lunch without a certain amount of mental preparation; and it was while revisiting the Festival website that I saw that I’d got it all wrong. They were actually due to play the Quartet Op.106 in G major by Antonin Dvorak.

This was, as they say, a result. Dvorak is unarguably one of music’s good guys; a viola player, a pigeon-fancier, and possibly (the precise facts are disputed) the only genuinely great composer to have qualified as professional butcher.