★★★★½ Some cool Sibelius and blazing Beethoven with a rousing Finnish.

Utzon Room, Sydney Opera House
September 18, 2016

You’re a string quartet and you’ve engaged a second cellist to play Schubert’s String Quintet but you want to get top return for your dollar. What do you do? Well, you couldn’t do better than to pair it with Nikolaus Simrock’s 1832 arrangement of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata for two violins, viola and two cellos.

^{Finnish String Quartet Meta4}

This seldom-heard anonymous take on the masterpiece, published five years after the composer’s death, was the climax of the latest Utzon Music Series recitals at Sydney Opera House, featuring the exciting Finnish string quartet Meta4 with Australian Chamber Orchestra Principal Cellist Timo-Veikko “Tipi” Valve. And what a musical discovery this is. If you go looking for a recording of it you’ll be hard put to find one, and the chances of hearing it live are pretty slim.

^{Cellist Timo-Veikko Valve}

This performance, therefore, was special, not least for the quality of the players – violinists Antti Tikkanen and Minna Pensola, violist Atte Kilpelainen and cellist Tomas...