Celebrating their 25th anniversary, the Euclid Quartet’s new recording showcases contrasting musical gems. All of them are favourite encores and some have backstories such as Schubert’s Quartettsatz which, first violinist Jameson Cooper admits, ‘beat us up pretty badly on our second-ever concert as students – and still is really tricky!’ No problem 25 years later; their command is exhilarating in its silken breadth and sleek virtuosity, and their phrasing of the magical second theme yields only to the incandescent performance by the David Oistrakh Quartet released last year on Praga.

Recorded in the Louise E Addicott and Yatish J Joshi Performance Hall at Indiana University South Bend, the dynamic energy of the bows biting into strings from the opening salvoes of Mozart’s Adagio and Fugue is stunning; its clarity and pinpoint sense of directionality bring you into the music with a powerful embrace.

The most contrasting part of the recital consists of a wonderfully lilting reading of William Bolcom’s Graceful Ghost Rag, a raucous take on the Polka from Shostakovich’s The Golden Age, a street-smart serenade in the form of Gershwin’s Lullaby and a tour de force performance of Javier Álvarez’s relentlessly teasing Metro Chabacano, written to be played during an exhibition of kinetic sculptures in the Mexico City station.

The rest of the programme is equally attractive: Puccini’s Crisantemi, Wolf’s Italian Serenade and Webern’s lush Langsamer Satz are played sumptuously if not occasionally lush; in Piazzolla’s Four the quartet are especially alert to the tang in ‘Tango’; and they thoroughly immerse themselves in the sad heroic romanticism of Turina’s recently very popular La oración del torero.