Górecki’s string quartets are fundamental to understanding his output, even though the first dates from 1988, his 55th year, and 12 years after the succès de scandale of the Symphony No 3. It is a work of extraordinary power, negotiating between the profoundest calm and material that anyone whose knowledge of the composer is limited to the Third Symphony might conceivably find shockingly violent. This is to misread Górecki, however. The reason for the apparent stasis of the symphony is precisely the blackness of the texts it sets; a reaction to them founded in violence would serve no purpose.

With a string quartet – generally speaking – there is no text, but there may well be a subtext, and that is provided here by the derivation of the musical material from a work by the early Polish Renaissance composer Szamotuy, a setting of a prayer for sleeping children. As Richard Whitehouse points out in his notes, references to childhood appear more and more frequently in the composer’s later work, and one might suppose the astoundingly visceral quality of certain parts of this quartet to be nightmarish. Certainly they provide nothing in the nature of consolatory sentimentalism.

The Quartet No 2, dating from 1991 and subtitled Quasi una fantasia, might similarly confound certain expectations. Quite apart from its specific evocation of Beethoven (and particularly the piano sonatas of Op 27), the sheer scale of the piece – in this recording it lasts just under 33 minutes – is enough to suggest that this is chamber music writ large. Górecki’s symphonic experience is indeed brought to bear on the medium of the string quartet in a work that plumbs the blackest depths of despair, scales the heights of luminous hope and finally leaves us with a question mark.

There are other outstanding recordings of these works, by the Royal String Quartet on Hyperion and the Kronos Quartet (for whom they were written and to whom they are dedicated) on Nonesuch, but the Tippetts not only provide renditions of equal stature, missing no nuance of either extreme calm or intransigent violence, but Naxos’s recording is as clear as a bell. We are given, in addition, Elementi for string trio (1962), the first of the Genesis cycle, a work hewn from stone but performed here with silken delicacy. This is a recording deserving of the very highest recommendation.