Everyone who writes about the Endellion String Quartet will mention the fact that they have been playing together for thirty years.  I wasn’t going to mention it, but then I changed my mind, not only because it is important and remarkable (indeed here I am, remarking it), but also because it is so blissfully apparent when you hear - and see - them play together. This ‘intense menage-a-quatre’ (as the cellist, David Waterman, called it) has been going on for three decades. For a quartet to be still playing together, in its original formation, is almost unheard of.  Ralph de Souza, the second violinist, is still teasingly referred to as ‘The Newbie’ – he only joined 28 years ago.

So how does this affect their playing – or what we see of it?  Their intonation, fluidity of phrasing and sensitivity to one another is certainly unimpeachable.  But what gave me real joy was to watch them communicate; given that they made musical conversation seem natural as breathing, perhaps it was more just watching them co-exist. Ordinarily I am a big fan of eye contact in chamber music, but the Endellions barely looked at each other.  And they didn’t need to.  There were together at every moment – I don’t mean the same place on the page, but together in the infinitesimal glimmers of detail, they were as one through the gasping stillness, to the chin-shaking, bow-flying conclusions.

The Quartet is known to be one of the finest in the world.  They are now in their 19th year of residency in Cambridge, and to hear them fondly refer to sold out West Road Concert Hall as their ‘home audience’ gave me a secret thrill.  A look from someone on my left told me that they, along with the other 494 people in the audience, were thinking the same thing.  And what a pleasure to see one of the best quartets in the world play a programme that couldn’t have been better - Shostakovich’s String Quartet No.8 AND Beethoven’s Op. 59 No. 1? Why thank you, kind Endellions, you are too generous.