Great sound this, four clarinets, each fitting nicely into a warm overall texture and matching their styles to the varieties of “rhapsody” on offer. Sydney Fell, a fine soloist himself and a respected teacher, was their founding inspiration and if the Quartet’s performances here are anything to go by, he can be proud that they bear his name.

Much of the music reflects the world of Yiddish klezmer, initially with Lenny Sayers’s very idiomatic-sounding Three Klezmer Melodies where the Quartet calls on all the trappings of true klezmer style, including racy glissandos and yelping staccatos. The same is true of Mazel Tov! and his Hungarian Rhapsody-style version of Raisins and Almonds, the principal tune a real tear-jerker, especially for the older Jewish community. The “arrangements of arrangements” by Ferenc Farkas transform dances and scenes from the villages and (I presume) courts of Old Hungary, tuneful, pithy miniatures played for much of the time with a suggested smile. Jirí Hudec’s Rapsodia per quattro and Antonín Tucapsky’s A Little Afternoon Music are both rather more urbane and if the arrangements from Bartók’s educational piano cycle Mikrokosmos – the “Ostinato” and closing “Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm” – sound rather more studied than the klezmer pieces, their relative harmonic sophistication, often with pungent dissonances worked in as part of the mix, surely justifies a more thoughtful approach. The fourth Bulgarian Dance (tr 12), which in all probability reflects Bartók’s latter-day appreciation of Gershwin, particularly suits this arrangement.

So, all in all, an enjoyable, carefully planned programme, very nicely engineered – though 20 minutes at a time might be the best way to listen. Excellent notes by Michael Church.