The cover of this disc looks a bit like a blond (with hair product) Reservoir Dogs, and there’s certainly an air of film-star energy to this recording. Although they have been around for a surprisingly long time, the Danish String Quartet (formerly known as the Young Danish String Quartet) still have the puppyish energy they had 11 years ago, but now that enthusiasm has the lustre of maturity that was missing in their earliest recordings of the Nielsen quartets for Kontrapunkt (10/93). Their recording of Haydn’s Lark Quartet and the tense, Beethoven-influenced Op 51 A minor Quartet of Brahms compares and contrasts one of Haydn’s best-known chamber works with one of Brahms’s less popular pieces.

These works are both virtuoso in their own way, though the Haydn is more overt in its technical demands; and in particular here, the slightly staid accompaniment of the finale is given its own validity and bounce by the energy with which it is played, and even gives the phosphorescent top line under which it sits extra momentum as a result. The overarching feeling one gets when listening to the Haydn is of light and space – a sense that is carried over to the Brahms, but perhaps with less reason. There are points in the latter, particularly in the Andante, when the harmony and inner parts move with such intense direction by way of yearning melody, harmonic dissonance and resolution that the music cries out for a more sustained approach than the Danish Quartet seem willing to give it. There is, though, a deliciously discombobulating lack of pulse in the opening of the first movement, which takes so long to shake off once it has righted itself that you really are compelled to listen with keener ears, which is ultimately what this work really needs.