The Shropshire Music Trust season opened with an exquisite evening of music-making at St Alkmund’s with The Dante Quartet led by Shrewsbury violinist Zoe Beyers.

Its billing was broadcast to the nation on BBC Radio 3. And rightly so, because the season opener lived up to all expectations in a lively concert of exquisite and stylish music-making by one the UK’s most exciting string quartets. In bringing the Dante Quartet to Shrewsbury, the ambition of the SMT – the sparkiest and most sparkling of gems in Shropshire’s cultural scene – was rewarded with a brilliantly considered and engaging programme that was framed by iconic works of formal poise with plenty in between that was by turns provocative, introspective and lyrical, in all senses of that word.

So named to conjure with ideas of an epic journey after Dante’s Commedia, violinists Zoe Beyers and Ian Watson, and Carol Ella and Richard Jenkinson on viola and cello set out with Haydn’s late ‘Fifths’ quartet in a rare minor key and with harmony that allowed for absorbing and evolving shades of darkness and light across the ensemble. Their playing danced with deft musical intelligence while never losing sight of the wry impishness that marks Haydn out as a master of the art. Its famous scherzo, ‘The Witches’ Canon’, was a case in point; the foursome positively revelled in its spooky sense of attack in an exercise of lithe and intent listening, their playing a masterclass of powerful theatricality.

While grace and inventiveness whirled around the silences of the fermata in Haydn, silences menaced an altogether more febrile and enervating soundscape in Janacek’s first quartet, ‘The Kreutzer Quartet’. Each movement is marked con moto, and with interpretative fearlessness these Dantean explorers choreographed an entire spectrum of differing psychological movements. The stop-start of spiritual torment, the spiky, almost hallucinogenic melodic lines erupting dream-like over feverish sostenuti travelled between parts with expert control. The packed audience in St Alkmund’s Church were enwrapt in the rise and fall of struggle as some kind of elusive ghost-in-the-machine battled with the truncated lyricism of its thematic montages. This was a remarkable piece delivered with haunting beauty and unforgettable mastery of conception.

Judith Weir’s String Quartet opened the second half. Here “relatively lyrical” lines – in the composer’s own words, from the excellent programme notes – drawn from song fragments moved to a folksy deconstruction of Scottish jig in its final movement, a daring and interesting preparation for Walton’s String Quartet in A Minor as our final destination. Elements of all that had been encountered before – transfixing colours of a minor key, scalic brilliance and virtuosity, and pin-drop tenderness in its penultimate Lento – combined festively in the programme’s climax.

All roads pointed ineluctably to this piece. Here was breath-taking audacity in a blaze of technical dazzle in its opening and final movements. But personally, I found the elegiac evocation of pastoral in the Lento the most affecting at the very heart of the piece, hovering magically somewhere between the idyll of green pastures and the idling of cicadas and love-lorn guitar. It sent me scurrying post-concert to the quartet’s acclaimed recordings of inter-war French and other English chamber music, but in the intimate and spontaneous space of a live performance, this delicious slow moment hit home with musicianship of the very highest order. Epic indeed. And what a journey.

James Fraser-Andrews