If a quartet has any character at all it needs to be easily identifiable blind, and the Quatuor Ysaÿe have always had personality in spades. Their own particular brand of French elegance (which occasionally borders on an engaging purist dourness, depending on how far they have strayed from the native repertoire at which they excel so highly) is unmistakable and will leave a glaringly vacant position when they disband in January 2014.

The real beauty of this disc is their grippingly graphic account of Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht and the way they bring out all its inherent influences. The text is never far away from the wordless music, and the players bring an almost Cabaret-esque subversiveness to the melodies, handling the piece more as if it were a treat (which it is) rather than a very serious, and rare, glimpse of Schoenberg’s relatively small number of tonal works. Their pianissimos are really very pianissimo and their fortes properly loud, one growing from the other by way of a change of colour as well as volume, which makes the listener – especially once into the Cabaret frame of mind – feel that they’re having an experience that’s more theatre than chamber.

The only criticism I have of this other-worldly recording is that the Brahms functions as little more than a foil to the Schoenberg – there to show off the high German Romantic ideals to which Schoenberg harks back in Verklärte Nacht. It results in a slightly poker-faced performance that could have done itself more frothy justice if it hadn’t been sacrificed to contextualise the Ysaÿe’s wonderful interpretation of the Schoenberg.