It’s not often you come out of a chamber music concert whistling Glenn Miller’s wartime hit, A String of Pearls. But then again the four Frenchmen who make up the Debussy Quartet are no run-of-the-mill group.

Formed 27 years ago in Lyons, where they were all students, violinists Christophe Collette and Marc Vieillefon, violist Vincent Deprecq and cellist Cédric Conchon have established themselves as one of the most hard-working string quartets around, touring the world and building up an impressive discography which includes albums for children alongside the complete Shostakovich set.

Neither are they conventional in their performance habits, working with acrobats from the Queensland company Circa, trailblazing new French music and democratically swapping lead violin duties.

For their Australian programme they played from memory – no music stands to act as a barrier between musicians and audience. They started on their feet with the Elegy section of Shostakovich’s Two Pieces, adapted from his ballet The Golden Age, which ran foul of the Stalinist regime for featuring an arrangement of the “decadent” Tea For Two.

The beautiful slow movement immediately pinpointed the Debussys’ seamless ensemble work and beautiful tone, Conchon’s mellow but meaty cello a feature.

The group, with Collette leading, remained standing for a riveting performance of Shostakovich’s seventh quartet, composed in 1960 in memory of his first wife Nina who had died six years earlier from cancer.

The deceptively perky opening bars made way for the slow middle movement in which Vieillefon’s second violin interwove sparsely with Conchon. The group highlighted the grief and anger of the final movement, building to an almost unbearably devastating final climax.

Beethoven’s compact and intense Serioso Op 95, the bridge between the middle and late quartets, was beautifully handled with Vieillefon taking the lead and the four sitting down. Colleagues and friends who know each other’s every move and musical thought made this extraordinary 22-minute work seem like the perfect slow-cooked dish, where all the complexities and complementary flavours were brought out with loving care. Heads were swaying and nodding in the dance-like allegro and allegretto sections.

The Debussys were back on their feet for the final work on the programme, one of their now-legendary performances of Ravel’s Quartet. I have heard this work on record and in concert countless times, but this was a performance to treasure.

With Collette back on lead every nuance, each subtle shading of this multi-layered work was carefully shaped and teased out over a glorious 30 minutes.

The packed Utzon Room audience wasn’t going to let them go without an encore or two, and the Debussys obliged with the sixth sonata from Haydn’s Seven Last Words and that nice jazzy catchy take on Miller’s swing classic. Formidable!

The Debussy String Quartet plays at QOAC, Brisbane on September 19.

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