Haydn had already acquired a reputation for the antic and the eccentric – inspired or downright offensive, according to taste – two decades before he embarked on his Op 33 quartets in 1781. But these new works, composed with a canny eye to popular appeal (and why not?), take what sober-minded critics dubbed ‘comic fooling’ to a new level of whimsy and caprice. The Doric Quartet, technically impeccable, commanding a wide palette of colour and dynamics, respond brilliantly to the zany, subversive strain that runs through what became Haydn’s most influential set of quartets. Exploiting the raw resonance of open strings, they play up the manic wildness of the Slavonic dance finale of the Bird, No 3, for all its worth – a thrilling performance this, right through to the throwaway pianissimo ending. Here and elsewhere – in the acerbic, gypsy-flavoured final Presto of No 1 (Haydn’s comedy can be distinctly edgy), or the gleeful slapstick of No 4’s closing Presto – they create a simultaneous sense of devil-may-care abandon and immaculate precision at speed.

The Doric are equally alive to the irreverent spirit of the Scherzos, as Haydn labelled the minuets, whether in the madcap cross-rhythms of No 5 or the stinging, proto-Beethovenian Scherzo in No 1, pointedly contrasted with the hushed, suave lines of the Trio; and leader Alex Redington deliciously milks the vulgar slides in the Trio of No 2, where Haydn seems to poke fun at a village fiddler. At the other end of the spectrum the Doric find a wonderfully veiled, husky sonority, evoking a viol consort, for the hymnlike anti-scherzo of No 3.

Anyone familiar with previous discs in the Doric’s ongoing Haydn series (Opp 20, 64 and 76) will know that they can be uncommonly free over tempo, occasionally to the point of mannerism. For my taste they overdo the quizzical hesitations at the start of No 1 (this tonally ambiguous music is quizzical enough played straight) or, especially, in the development of the opening movement of the Joke, No 2. These distensions and dreamy lingerings, intriguing at first, perhaps, can become enervating on repeated hearings.

More often, though, the Doric’s unusual rhythmic flexibility illuminates rather than frustrates: say, in the magical pianissimo sequence of suspensions towards the end of the first-movement development of No 3 or the teasingly timed opening of No 4 – pure opera buffa, this, and guaranteed to provoke a smile. Elsewhere the Doric relish the lyrical sweep and sheer richness of sonority (again using the resonance of open strings) in the almost symphonic first movement of No 5, and are ideally lithe and puckish in the opening Vivace assai of No 6, its quickfire banter tempered by moments of delicate poetry.

The demotic, destabilising spirit of comic opera, sometimes carried to absurd extremes, is, of course, far from the whole picture in Op 33. And one of the chief pleasures of these discs is the insight with which the Doric shape and inflect each of the slow movements, acutely responsive to harmonic colour: from the mingled sweetness and hypnotic strangeness of No 1’s Andante, through the rapturous Largo of No 4 (where they vindicate a romantically expansive tempo), to the gently floated D minor Andante of No 6, poised somewhere between aria and hymn.

My own favourite recordings of Op 33 include The Lindsays (ASV, 3/96, 9/96), the provocatively inventive Casals (Harmonia Mundi, 11/09) and the London Haydn Quartet (Hyperion, A/13), who imaginatively exploit the sonorities of period instruments. There is plenty to provoke and argue with here, too. Occasionally I missed an earthy directness which is a crucial part of Haydn’s make-up. But for delighted engagement with this deceptively rich, often crazy music, the Doric’s colourful performances, beautifully recorded and enhanced by W Dean Sutcliffe’s stimulating notes, are up there with the best.