Every string quartetter, amateur or pro, knows the problem of finding appropriate encore pieces, and every quartet has its own solution. This delightful disc compiles five decades’ worth of encores as played (and, for the most part, arranged) by the Brodsky Quartet, as a sort of 50th-anniversary gift from the Brodskys to their fans. The result – lovingly presented and played with consummate finesse – is like a selection box of handmade musical confectionery.

What strikes you first is the seriousness and craft with which the members of the group have gone about choosing and transcribing works from other mediums. True, there are the expected lollipops – Khachaturian’s ‘Sabre Dance’, Bazzini’s Ronde des lutins – delivered with huge zip and panache. Debussy’s second Arabesque comes out sounding rather like Borodin or Glazunov (two arrangements from Shostakovich’s The Gadfly are altogether saltier) and Satie’s Gnossiennes (arranged by the group’s leader, Krysia Osostowicz) sound even stranger in their quartet form. You might say they’ve been rewilded. Saint-Saëns’s ‘Le cygne’, meanwhile, becomes Les cygnes to accommodate a guest appearance by cellist Laura van der Heijden and the result – as you’d expect – is utterly succulent.

But overall, the selection feels more reflective (I don’t say valedictory) than previous Brodsky encore anthologies (this is the fourth), and at times it strikes surprisingly deep. Bird-cries become shooting stars in a transcription (again, with van der Heijden as second cello) of Pablo Casals’s El cant dels ocells, and Isidora Žebeljan’s An Intimate Letter from the Judean Desert – the one wholly original quartet composition here – ends the disc with a haunting unanswered question. Encores should ideally seem effortless, but the best linger in the imagination long after the concert has ended. These do exactly that.