Alfano’s First begins like a quartet using jump-leads to start a Janáček piece (though it dates from 1915, eight years before The Kreutzer Sonata). It sputters into life, lurches off, judders to a halt and goes off again. Only with the second subject, three minutes in, is some measure of continuity established. It is almost the last music you’d expect from a Neapolitan composer known first and foremost for completing Puccini’s Turandot. Only later, in the cool thrum of the slow middle movement, does the influence of Ravel’s essay in the genre become pervasive.

On an initial encounter – these are all first recordings, and all the more valuable for that – the First’s finale could do with more of Ravel’s rigorous approach to form. Cellist Samuel Magill contributes a useful booklet essay on the shape of the individual works, though it would be good to know more about how Alfano became the composer he did. Magill hears an element of organum in the slow unfolding of the Second’s opening movement. Maybe so, though the harmony wanders off course, and the tuning likewise, before the muted, rustic dance of the middle movement.

Over a decade ago, these musicians made two albums of Alfano’s chamber music on Naxos, which may be why they perform here under their own names. Regardless, they play as a strong, single-minded collective and bring a persuasively raw, sinewy exhilaration to the Bartókian finale of the Second. Alfano was 70 when he wrote the Third in 1945, and there is a palpable air of mature retrospection that brings his verismo operatic idiom to bear on the inner drama of the quartet tradition. Anyone with even a passing interest in the byways of quartet literature should find the Third in particular, but also the album as a journey, rewards their attention.