The legacy of 14 quartets by Conrado del Campo (1878-1953) has so far not won the attention of Naxos’s compendious series of Spanish classics. A serious omission, it seems, and in any case the Naxos performances of quartets by Guridi, Bréton and others cannot rival the musical and technical polish on display here. Any composer would be glad to have the Quatuor Diotima on their side: the fearless quality of Yun-Peng Zhao’s first violin is answered in full by a trio of lively musical personalities, placing the quartet in the forefront of modern French ensembles.

There is nothing very French or Spanish about del Campo’s music, on the basis of this album. Completed in 1913 and dedicated to the memory of the composer’s mother, the Eighth Quartet stands as an impressive counterpart to Schoenberg’s First, in its 40-minute scale and rich profusion of melodic ideas fused into a language of chromatic romanticism on the edge of implosion.

Not that del Campo ever took the plunge into a brave new world, as Schoenberg did. Instead, he broke off writing quartets for a full 30 years after the Eighth, perhaps further disillusioned by a lack of performances even by the quartet of which he had been the viola player, and concentrated his creative energies on zarzuela and opera. Yet the Ninth finds him picking up almost where he had left off, in an idiom by now soaked in retrospection, yet to which he brings undimmed vitality.

Perhaps his experience of writing for the stage disciplined del Campo in his melody-writing: despite their length, these quartets never get caught up in the kind of abstract noodling that congests the writing of many lower-division quartet composers. For a point of entry, try the Scherzo of the Ninth: temperamentally sunny, rhythmically sprung and (not surprisingly) composed from the inside, as it were, so that each part sings. Excellent sound and supporting booklet: do investigate del Campo for yourself.