Dangerous passions rage in Leo Tolstoy's 1890 novella “The Kreutzer Sonata”, in which Beethoven's famous violin sonata becomes the symbolic trigger of a selfish, loveless jealousy that drives a man to murder his allegedly unfaithful wife. Tolstoy's sermon against adultery did not interest Leoš Janáček in his First String Quartet, composed in 1923, which he also named “Kreuzer Sonata”; instead, he wholeheartedly took the side of the woman denigrated to the passive object of male urges. Janáček's ardent music forms part of an engaging programme given by the splendid French Quatuor Ébène. Joseph Haydn's D major quartet, one of the so-called “Sun Quartets”, is one of his most popular, not only because of its wonderfully unruly “Menuet alla Zingarese”. And, following a two-year break, Johannes Brahms's added his B-flat major quartet op. 67 to his earlier op. 51 string quartets of 1873 to form a triad - with music that follows the Haydnesque model and which “almost gleefully plays off the most extraordinary boldness with its severity of harmony and voice-leading, while effortlessly maintaining the tone of playfulness and the air of a loose, seemingly improvisatory construction” (Ludwig Finscher)