Amber Quartet finds their groove

In 1827, Mendelssohn, 18 years old then, was desperately in love with a woman, who was said to be a singer in a choir he accompanied on Friday nights in Berlin. Mendelssohn poses the question "is it true?" in a song inspired by his friend Johann Gustav Droyson's poem titled Frage (German word for "question"), which he composed in 1827 and was published as Op 9, No 1.

A few months after writing the song, Mendelssohn composed his second string quartet, String Quartet No 2 in A Minor, Op 13. The song underlies the entire quartet, as Mendelssohn emphasized when he had the published quartet include the complete song.

"We love Op 13 very much, so it was natural for us to record it in the new album. Since Op 13 and Op 9, No 1 are connected closely, we wanted to have them both recorded. To us, it's academic research to go back to the intention of the composers. To the listeners, it will offer them a clue to better understand the compositional thinking of the composer," says Yang.

"These two works were relatively new to us. When we recorded these two works in April, we had never performed them onstage yet. The process of learning and rehearsing these two pieces was a fresh experience to us since usually we recorded music works that we had performed onstage already," says Ning. "It felt like we worked together in a lab and made something new together."

On June 19, Amber Quartet performed the two pieces at the Forbidden City Concert Hall in Beijing for the first time.

They also played the composer's String Quartet No 6 in F Minor, Op 80 during the concert. In July, they recorded the music piece, which was included in their new album.

String Quartet No 6 in F Minor, Op 80 was not new to Amber Quartet. Indeed, it is one of their most performed music pieces. As students of the Alban Berg Quartett, one of the finest string quartets in the world, they learned the piece when they studied at the International Institute of Chamber Music of Madrid in Spain, as the first chamber music group to receive funding from the Chinese government for overseas studies.