This season, the Konzerthaus Quartet, with our  first concertmaster Sayako Kusaka as first violin, spans the spectrum from Haydn’s famous ‘Emperor Quartet’ – in whose second movement the melody of the German national anthem is heard – to Leoš Janáček’s String Quartet No. 2, which he wrote in 1928, a few months before his death, and titled ‘Intimate Letters’. The title says it all: the work is imbued with the 74-year-old’s long-standing unfulfilled passion for Kamila Stöslová, who was almost forty years his junior. In his correspondence with her, the composer describes quite clearly what lies behind the four movements. The evening concludes with “one of the most heart-rending confessions of the melancholic Brahms”: he published his first string quartet in 1873, together with the second, only after 20 years of preparatory work.