Presented here are the quartets of Barber and Ives, including a surprise extra: the original finale for the Barber, which he recast several times. I must say I prefer it, and the Escher Quartet give this Andante mosso a welcome breath of life. The first movement has a strident and muscular opening, played here with unity and decisiveness. The hymn tune is particularly beautiful. My only reservation is to wonder whether it’s at times a bit too masterly, a bit too smooth. For context I listened to the fascinating 1938 recording by the Curtis Quartet, for whom the work was written, and it’s really striking in its dark, gritty, foreboding tone and rushing energy, which seems appropriate for those times.

This slow movement later became the famous Adagio for Strings. Barber knew it was something special when he completed it, writing to the cellist of the Curtis Quartet: ‘It is a knockout!’ Premiered live on a nationwide broadcast conducted by Toscanini in 1938, it has since been used for countless solemn events, perhaps most famously providing the sonic backdrop to Oliver Stone’s Vietnam War epic Platoon. As much as we might miss the hushed growl of the massed strings, the Escher achieve something more sophisticated here. They keep it moving, unsentimental, and spin a thin, rarefied texture. The effect they create is intensely stark because the pressure of each line rests on the individual players, like lone voices crying out in the darkness.

In the first of Ives’s quartets the Escher find an impressively mammoth chorale sound for some of the American hymn tunes that Ives jaggedly juxtaposes with atonality. He described the Second Quartet as ‘one of the best things I have’. His strategy was to plot an argument between the players, rather than Goethe’s usual four ‘rational people’ having a ‘discussion’. The string tone is so lush that at times I feel a bit more bite would have provided a refreshing edge. Ives once acerbically wrote that he started this quartet as a reaction to attending ‘one of those nice Kneisel concerts’, a quartet whose playing he found too ‘beautiful’ and ‘trite’: he wanted to push players to the edge of (and beyond) what was comfortable. At various points, the Escher courageously plunge straight over this precipice, no less than in the finale, which they attack with real grit and commitment.