Grieg’s G minor Quartet demands a lot of its performers, depending as it does on emotional colour and atmosphere. In 1937 the Budapest Quartet found the right tone for every passage – played like this, the work acquires an elated, almost visionary quality. The Kocian Quartet don’t quite get this far but their playing is vigorous and expressive. The tone of each instrument has real character, so that in the second-movement Romanza, for example, where the melody is passed around, each phrase has its own colour. Sometimes, particularly in the first movement, the playing seems slightly matter-of-fact; the Emerson Quartet, for instance, are better able to convey the sense of a dark, threatening landscape. And I find the finale’s Presto rather heavy; here the swifter, lighter interpretations of the Budapest and the Emerson are certainly preferable.

It seems likely that Grieg would have known his friend Svendsen’s Octet. Written some 10 years before Grieg’s quartet, it had proved an instant success and, with its colourful harmonic style and distinctive melodies, must have appeared quite new and exotic at its first performance in Leipzig. The opening movement is based on a memorable theme, which tends to dominate obsessively; the following Allegro scherzeroso [sic] is a splendid piece, full of richly varied, fantastical invention. The Andante slow movement makes full use of the eight instruments to produce exceptionally rich, expressive textures. Here, I felt the performance needed a firmer sense of direction, but otherwise it’s an admirably vital, well-integrated account.