In it concerts this season at Stockbridge Church -- a

Queen's Hall lookalike in a different part of town, with gentler, more

flattering acoustics -- the Edinburgh Quartet has been combining Nordic

string quartets with Viennese quintets. The mix has proved popular. Even

Sibelius's austere masterpiece in D minor, a work that has never enjoyed

the wide success of his symphonies, was no deterrent when, on Sunday, it

shared the warmer climate of Brahms's Clarinet Quintet.

Though not the most forbidding of his works, Sibelius's Voces Intimae,

as he called it, dates from the sombre period in his life when, under

what he feared to be the threat of throat cancer, he also produced his

Fourth Symphony and his symphonic poem The Bard.

Its odd five-movement structure has led some ensembles to treat it

lopsidedly as a conventional four-movement work preceded by a prelude.

But the Edinburgh Quartet's performance left no doubt that the slow

central movement -- one of Sibelius's most pared down yet most

passionate utterances -- forms the heart of the matter, with the other

movements providing a symmetrical framework. The balance as a result,

was Bartokian, but the intimate voices, sometimes murmuring, sometimes

sharp-edged, were Sibelius's own.

By placing it between early Mozart (the little string quartet, K191)

and late Brahms, the players gave Sibelius's frozen scenery a gilded

framework. With Lawrence Gill, a gifted young member of what is still

the Scottish Opera Orchestra, on clarinet, the Brahms in particular

glowed with a sad serenity that was exactly right.