Cambridge Summer Music Festival

It's a tough old world out there for newly established classical music groups, string quartets in particular. The ones that go on to survive and blossom may well be those that have some unique selling point or something that makes them stand out from the crowd.

When the Finzi Quartet walked on stage for Thursday's concert at Emmanuel URC it seemed to me that the players had already gone a long way towards achieving an image all of their own.

Certainly as soon as they began their performance of Haydn's Quartet in D Opus 20 No 4, it was clear that either the four players shared very similar musical backgrounds or that they've notched up hundreds of hours of hard practice together. Or possibly both. This particular work is full of unusual rhythms, quirky detours into unexpected keys, and eccentricities of all kinds. And only a unified vision plus exemplary preparation could have created a performance that was so convincing and satisfying.

One of the really special features of the Finzi Quartet's playing is that so much of it takes place on the edge of pure silence and stillness. Many of the intricate phrases of the Haydn grew out of nothing and returned to nothing, emphasising the speculative and ethereal qualities of the music. Hand in hand with this goes dynamics. Moving in volume from the almost inaudible to the almost overwhelming is another of the quartet's special qualities.