It’s easy to forget that when Beethoven’s Op 18 quartets appeared in 1801 Haydn had yet to publish his own final quartet. The Eybler Quartet certainly haven’t made that mistake: as specialists in 18th-century repertoire, they make no bones about treating Beethoven as a radical. A thoughtful booklet note by their viola player Patrick Jordan explains how they’ve used various different Urtext editions, as well as deciding – more contentiously – to adhere closely to the metronome marks that Beethoven appended some decades later.

First impressions are certainly startling, and not just for the headlong velocity at which the Eyblers attack the first movement of Op 18 No 1 – a speed that occasionally leaves passagework sounding scrambled, not to say (in the finale of Op 18 No 2) hectic. The acoustic (fittingly enough for such uncompromising interpretations, it’s the Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto) is close and dry, which will not be to all tastes. Personally, I’d rather have drawing-room intimacy than a cathedral-like resonance in this music, and it’s perfectly transparent and often thrillingly physical: loud passages have the explosive bite of a tutti in a Haydn symphony.

And once you’ve acclimatised, the revelations flood in: the swiftness with which the Eyblers take the great Adagio of Op 18 No 1 allows violinist Aisslinn Nosky’s almost vibrato-free period-instrument tone to sound breathtakingly fragile. The playing throughout is defiantly un glossy but consistently stylish: the helter-skelter finale of Op 18 No 3 rustles and glints like Mendelssohn’s fairy music, and elsewhere there’s an invigorating kick to Beethoven’s rhythmic games. The Trio of Op 18 No 1’s Scherzo is just straight-up hilarious. This set might infuriate you or it might delight you: either way, I suspect, Beethoven would have been more than happy.