Few composers were more fiercely self-critical than Brahms. His habit of destroying works he viewed as unworthy remained with him all his life, and this is partly explained by his sense of past achievement, most notably in the string quartet form. Yet he produced many chamber music masterpieces. As one writer put it, ‘where sheer beauty is evoked, it is as a consolation; nostalgia and melancholy often seem to underlie the most rhythmically assertive ideas’. Such ambiguity is at the heart of both the A minor String Quartet and the Clarinet Quintet. On the other hand, most notably in the Quartet’s second-movement Andante moderato, there is contrast rather than integration, with outer sections that serenely resolve all that has gone flanking central vigour.

The change from Op 51 to Op 115 is not surprising, marked by a greater feeling of all things autumnal and ending in a transcendental calm. Here and throughout, Michael Collins’s awareness of his role as primus inter pares rather than prima donna is one of the special joys of this outstanding disc. Both he and the Brodskys erase all possible strenuousness and opacity (always dangers in such richly contrapuntal writing) with supreme clarity, vigour and refinement. Finely recorded, this is outstanding even by Collins and the Brodsky’s standards.