SESSION REPORT

The Engegård Quartet’s third album of Mozart string quartets was all about timing – from allowing enough space between learning and recording the works, to faithfully honouring the composer’s tempo markings – as Andrew Mellor discovers

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here were no winners during the pandemic last summer, but chamber musicians in Scandinavia were among the lucky ones. Long obsessed with chamber music, the region saw performances with audiences resume in June while travel bans continued to effectively close borders. Festivals looked to domestic ensembles to fill the gaps, among them the Engegård Quartet, which had seen its own tour to South America evaporate.

And so it was, in relative terms, a fruitful summer for the Oslo ensemble. Its annual 1-2-3 Festival went ahead with pianist Olli Mustonen as guest artist, and in June it mustered at Sofienberg Church in Oslo’s east end to record the third instalment in its eight-disc survey of Mozart’s works for string quartet. The wide building, without the wraparound gallery ubiquitous in Scandinavian churches, has a reputable acoustic: ‘lovely and natural, not too boomy,’ says the Engegård Quartet’s violist Juliet Jopling.