In reviewing the first volume of Bartók quartets featuring these Dutch-based players I affirmed that ‘the Ragazze Quartet certainly cut the mustard. If Vol 2 is as good as this, there’ll be cause to celebrate’ (7/19). Happily, I can suggest you raise a glass to this second volume which is, if anything, even finer than the first. Words or phrases that I used then such as ‘dancing demeanour’, ‘rapt mystery’, ‘Messiaenic evocation of birdsong’ and ‘punk-like’ attack apply equally here. An element of prayer, too, in the Adagio molto and Andante that flank the ‘cool’ syncopations of the Alla bulgarese central movement of the Fifth Quartet. By contrast, the centre of the first movement is a crazed kick-around set to a bopping soundtrack.

The introduction to the Third Quartet is an eerie dialogue among four until somewhere beyond the minute mark, the Ragazze, who realise the music’s intense voicing largely without vibrato, sporting anger rather than mystery. Next comes the second part’s fraught rhythms, projected here with unsparing aggression, the fugue (3'17") dispatched with maximum drive, before caterwauling portamentos claw away mercilessly. Can you really call this ‘chamber music’? A pretty redundant term in Bartók’s case, I’d say, though the unsettling intimacy – mixed in with ribald caricature – of the Sixth Quartet, written shortly before the anti-fascist composer left his homeland for good, transports us further into Bartók’s inner world than any other of his works.

Each of its four movements opens in a mood of inconsolable sadness (which dominates the finale completely). But after the emotional vicissitudes of the first movement, where a sense of play alternates with moments of great tenderness, the middle two movements break the genre’s mould: the second a sort of lazily marching equivalent of The Good Soldier vejk (Jaroslav Hašek’s novel exploring the pointlessness and futility of military discipline and conflict in general), with bizarre folk-like cadenzas and a close that balances on the edge of swing; and the third a ‘Burletta’ (1'42") in which the Ragazze push for maximum hilarity, sliding around the notes as if rolling their eyes and yawning at all the goose-stepping that’s going on around them (Germany was already in the throes of Nazism when Bartók wrote the piece). Similarly in the cheesy mock-minuet at 5'55" into the Fifth Quartet’s finale, the opening of which they skilfully tuck into the close of the previous loud chord.

It’s all here, in the music itself – love, belligerence, tenderness, asceticism, athleticism, thoughtfulness – just as it is in Beethoven’s quartets. For the Ragazze Quartet catching the mood is everything, more so than dotting Is and crossing Ts: for that you need the Emerson (DG, 12/88), the Tokyo Quartet’s first recording (DG Eloquence, 10/94) or the early Juilliard (Sony, 9/21), whereas the Takács (Decca, 4/98) represent a workable compromise. But for me, with the Ragazze still ringing in my ears (the actual sound has considerable presence), I’m ‘in the zone’, at least for the time being, and that’s where I’m happy to stay.