The Op 119 Bagatelles go superbly for quartet, the various conversations in the part-writing gaining an extra witty point thanks to the changes of tone colour. Admittedly No 3 is more of a strain for the violins than it is on the piano, but the more trenchant passages (such as the coda to that piece and No 5) kick up a splendid racket. Matthews’s editorial interventions always have musical point.

A far less likely candidate for transcription, on the face of it, is the A major Sonata. True, Beethoven himself made his own arrangement for quartet of his E major Piano Sonata, Op 14 No 1, but Matthews’s presentation of Op 101 is more of a curate’s egg. To my mind the finale comes off best. The first movement here becomes merely jaunty, losing the inwardness Beethoven asks for, while the third movement sounds reduced in stature by the superimposed dynamics (whether from the transcription or the performance I know not). I confess to some bafflement regarding the third bar of the second movement, where the top voice loses Beethoven’s motivic profile. Is this a faulty transcription or a deliberate change, or perhaps even an oddity of the performance or recording?

Unfortunately the boxy, close-up recorded sound does the players and the music no favours. And while the members of the Kreutzer Quartet continue to serve Matthews loyally, one could wish for more technical finish, while the comparatively narrow range of tone-colour tends to amplify minor imperfections in intonation (particularly worrying, I found, in the Diabelli Variation and the B flat Sonata slow movement), and undamped resonances from the cello’s low open strings are a recurring distraction.

For me the variations on the Eighth Bagatelle from Op 119 that constitute Matthews’s 25-minute Quartet No 11 are the most absorbing experience on this disc. Matthews starts by leading the ear by steps from the original into his own inventive world, then offers a mixture of the cussedly argumentative and the quixotically characteristic (as in the drunk-sounding Tempo di mazurka). At first encounters I’m not sure the penultimate Cavatina lives up to its apparent aspirations to profundity, but the final fugue certainly fires on all cylinders.