Playing Dvořák well seems to be par for the course these days, whereas playing him beautifully isn’t. The young Cypress String Quartet – who formed in 1996 and have already recorded the late Beethoven quartets – have the technical wherewithal, but bearing in mind that they have (I presume) taken their name from Dvořák’s fetching cycle of love songs-cum-quartet miniatures, I was surprised at their relatively cavalier approach, especially in the first song, though some of the later miniatures fare rather better – No 9, ‘Thou only dear one’, for example. Turn to virtually any decent rival (I had the Panocha and Lindsay Quartets to hand) and the contrast is startling: relative ‘plain speaking’ as opposed to genuine affection from the Cypress Quartet. These are decent, incisively voiced performances that for much of the time are noticeably short on tonal allure.

Op 106 is probably the prime draw but, again, in comparison with the Lindsay Quartet there’s no contest. The work’s very opening finds the older group sizzling with enthusiasm, excitement and a keen sense of anticipation, much as the tonally richer Pavel Haas Quartet do on their much later Supraphon recording. In the great Adagio, the Cypress Quartet maintain the tension but the Pavel Haas’s sound is so much more engaging and their scherzo has rather more of a rustic ‘edge’ to it (the Lindsay’s does, too). Sample the Panocha and Prague Quartets and you experience further varieties of local colour, which is the principal ingredient lacking in these performances, intelligently interpreted though they are. The sound is excellent.