Quartet in F Op 96 (American) - Dvorak

Quartet No 1 (From My Life) - Smetana

Quartet in A minor D804 - Schubert

There was a delayed start to the concert by the Hungarian Auer String Quartet at the Assembly Room of County Hall, Dun Laoghaire, on Monday, as rows of extra seats were put out to accommodate the numbers that turned up for the event. It seemed like a just reward for the promoter, Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, a local authority which is excitingly active in the area of music. The council commissioned a work from Ronan Guilfoyle and presented it on CD at the opening of its new County Hall last year; and in October it will launch its first composer-in-residence scheme, with Stephen Gardner as incumbent.

The Auer's ordering of their programme, reversing the conventional chronological sequence, made complete musical sense, acknowledging by position the lightness of Dvoak's American Quartet and the substance of Schubert's Quartet in A minor, D804.

In the Dvorak, the Auers adopted an earnest, searching approach, employing lots of high contrast and downplaying sweetness and sentimentality.

The probing manner and firmness of resolution seemed more fully at one in depicting the "remembrance of my life and the catastrophe of complete deafness" of Smetana's First Quartet, though there were some surprising momentary lapses in the playing for a group that has had such success in international competitions (most recently at the London International String Quartet Competition in 1997).

In the closing Schubert there was a relaxation in the tightness of the group's tone, but their tendency towards what you might call a centring of tempo, a gravitation towards a middle ground, remained. In Dvorak and Smetana this had been felt in the deliberation of the fastest movements. In the Schubert, it was manifested in the pressing forward of the opening Allegro, and the fastish flow of the Andante which followed.

It was surprising that such an obviously thoughtful group, so assiduous in calculating moment-by-moment contrasts of foreground and background, should dilute the effectiveness of tempo differences within works as a whole.