The billing might initially suggest a radical take on Haydn’s lofty Passion meditations. What we get, though, is a modest reworking of the string quartet version for quartet and mezzo-soprano by the Spanish organist-composer José Peris Lacasa. In the process the voice makes only flitting, fragmentary appearances, confined to the principal motifs (corresponding to the ‘Words’) of each movement. Usually the singer takes over the first violin line, more rarely the second, with the two violin parts either discreetly rewritten or omitted.

The upshot will, I suspect, be touching or mildly irritating, according to taste. While they could phrase and colour the assuaging music in Nos 3, 6 and 7 more tenderly, the Henschel Quartet play with fierce commitment. They choose their tempi shrewdly, balancing spaciousness with forward momentum, and are always sensitive to expressive import of the pauses and interrupted cadences so crucial in this music. Burning remorselessly into the strings, they make the final Earthquake more convincing than do most quartets. Perhaps I would have enjoyed Peris’s gloss more if the singer had a purer tone. Susanne Kelling’s light mezzo is pleasant enough and she sings with evident feeling. But her voice lacks a really firm centre and can sound stretched at both ends of its compass – though it’s hardly her fault that Peris’s obsessively repeated exclamations of ‘I thirst’ in No 5 diminish rather than enhance the music’s impact. While I’m glad to have heard the Henschel in this music, I can’t quite see the point of this disc. If you want Haydn’s quartet arrangement of his sublime orchestral original, go for the Lindsays, Rosamunde or, for a superb performance on gut strings, the Fitzwilliam.