Ning Feng violin ; Adrien La Marca viola ; Julian Steckel cello ; Frank Dupree piano

Mahler was in his mid-teens when he began work on a piano quartet. Although he abandoned the project, its first movement survived and was rediscovered by the composer’s widow, Alma Mahler-Werfel, in the 1960s. It provides the yearning introduction to this evening’s programme, performed by a quartet of superb chamber players. The first of Mozart’s two piano quartets, rich in drama and pathos, is matched in the concert’s second half by Robert Schumann’s Opus 47, in which, as one commentator put it, the ‘composer’s fecundity seems inexhaustible’.