The quartet is the basic unit of string chamber music. Two violins, a viola and a cello: subtract any one of those, and you’re walking a tightrope. Add further players and the issue is redundancy: you’d better know precisely what you want to do with those additional voices, because otherwise they’ll congeal like cold gravy. When it comes to the string octet – two string quartets fused together – only the 16-year-old Mendelssohn really cracked it, going all out for transparency, daring and youthful verve.

The Romanian George Enescu took the opposite approach. His Octet of 1900 is chamber music as epic construction project, wrought from steel, not spindrift. ‘No engineer launching his first suspension bridge across a river can have agonised more than I did as I filled my manuscript paper with notes,’ wrote the young composer, who confessed himself ‘crushed’ by the effort. A planned première was abandoned as too difficult, and Enescu ended up sanctioning a version for string orchestra – the ultimate admission of defeat for any serious chamber composer.

No fear of that at the Wigmore Hall, where the Beare’s Chamber Music Festival had assembled a string supergroup. Sounds tacky, I know, but what else can you call an octet led........

© The Spectator