It’s possible to have mixed feelings about Franz Anton Hoffmeister. As a publisher, he gave the world Mozart’s Quartet K499; less happily, he also advised Mozart that his two piano quartets were too difficult for sale, thus nipping an entire genre in the bud. Yet technical difficulty clearly didn’t prevent him from composing, in his own right, four highly virtuoso if slightly foursquare ‘solo quartets’ for string trio plus a double bass, which – soaring high above its normal register – effectively takes the place of a first violin.

The four players on this disc have already recorded the first two quartets (4/18), and I can only echo David Threasher’s admiration for Niek de Groot’s characterful playing of the solo bass parts by which these pieces stand or fall. De Groot’s top register is particularly sweet, and his phrasing is shapely – both real assets in music which, with the best will in the world, is more polite than inspired. The other three players offer affectionate, elegant support, captured in sound that’s spacious but slightly boomy, especially in the crucial bottom register.

Again, as on the first disc in the series, BIS has paired the Hoffmeister with three of the 12-year-old Rossini’s String Sonatas – and in this more familiar music the ensemble’s weaknesses are more pronounced. While cellist Tuomas Lehto positively scampers over Rossini’s exuberant high-lying passagework, violinist Minna Pensola sounds less comfortable, occasionally smudging the intonation. And even in Rossini’s juvenilia, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect performances that are a bit more flamboyant, more spirited: in a word, more operatic. The tempos here verge on the languid. Still, as background music to a dinner party – surely Hoffmeister’s destiny, if not Rossini’s – they’ll probably do just fine.