The slow introduction which gave Mozart's Dissonance Quartet its nickname was such a puzzle to 19thcentury ears that the owner of the composer's autograph manuscript was pursued by a German professor anxious to check the original, because printed copies were believed to be "defective".

The tensions of Mozart's remarkable opening, so strangely out of keeping with the character of the rest of the work, have challenged the insights of many a quartet in modern times, too. At the Law Society in Blackhall Place on Sunday night, the Czech Skampa Quartet were such a model of insightful restraint in these 22 mysterious bars that it was the more emphatic style they adopted in the rest of the work which came to seem slightly out of place.

Dvorak's late Quartet in G, Op. 106, languishes in popularity well behind the composer's best-known quartet, the American - the ratio of performances in Ireland since 1990 is of the order of 40:1. The later work may not have the immediate tunefulness of the American but it brims with good spirits, which were effectively communicated in Sunday's performance.

Pianist Kathryn Stott balanced nicely the demands of supportiveness and assertion in Franck's Piano Quintet. The string players may not have quite managed to invest Franck's writing with the necessary variety of expression. But the restless chromaticism and seething passion of the work (said to have been inspired by an infatuation with Augusta Holmes, a French composer of Irish parentage) carry a charge that never fails to exert a unique thrall.