It comes as no surprise to learn that this young group from St Petersburg has won several prestigious prizes, including the 2003 London International String Quartet Competition. From the first bars of the Mozart we can appreciate the quartet’s beautiful balance and blend of sounds, and we’re quickly aware, too, that the music is being played with real understanding: all the dynamics and articulation marks scrupulously observed, and contributing to a strong overall view of each movement’s expressive character. The one disappointment, a severe one, is the number of repeats omitted – the finale has a slightly breathless, even trivial, character if 16 bars are taken out of each variation.

Having performed Mozart with true refinement, the Atrium Quartet easily changes to a more full-bloodied style for Tchaikovsky. True, their playing doesn’t have the amplitude, range and individuality of expression that mark the Borodin Quartet’s approach to this work, but there’s something to be said for the younger group’s simplicity and directness and for the way the great funereal Andante retains throughout the con moto that Tchaikovsky asks for. The long first movement, too (the chamber-music equivalent of one of Tchaikovsky’s great symphonic panoramas), flows forward powerfully and irresistibly.

The Atrium Shostakovich is another brilliantly played, characterful performance. Its second movement is taken at a true Lento, impressively sustained, and the dissonant first part of the finale has a splendidly uninhibited, earthy quality, giving way eventually to equally striking soft, sinister, skeletal waltz music. A most auspicious début!