Felix Mendelssohn wrote his first complete string quartet within months of Beethoven’s death in 1827. The work, later published as the prodigiously gifted young composer’s Second String Quartet, was inspired by the example of Beethoven’s string quartets, which Mendelssohn knew well.

The Calidore String Quartet’s Coffee Concert concludes with Beethoven’s emotionally complex Second ‘Razumovsky’ Quartet, in which silence serves to articulate and intensify the musical argument.