This is a brilliant idea for a CD. Composed within a time-frame of 11 years (1917-28), at a similar geographical distance from the main cosmopolitan centres of music, and with similar stylistic overlaps between late Romanticism and modernism, these two pairs of quartets make for genuinely illuminating comparison. And they fit neatly onto one CD.

Sadly, however, the playing does not do justice to the music. Intonation, tonal warmth and blend, range of dynamics and colour, timing and structural pacing, and general freedom of expression are all disappointing, and just a few seconds of comparative listening reveals a gulf of achievement in every one of the 14 movements on the disc. Since the sound itself is lacking in Chandos’s trademark warmth, I wonder if the acoustic or some other adverse circumstance is partly to blame for the impression that these performances were really not ready to be recorded. Certainly the results seem barely representative of an ensemble with a number of high-quality CDs to its name.

For vastly more persuasive accounts of Szymanowski’s idiosyncratic and rarely heard Quartets do try and find the Carmina Quartet (Denon – nla – with 30 minutes’ less music but a technical security and expressive purpose and direction that largely elude the Schoenbergs). Likewise the Talich Quartet (as indeed many others) are greatly to be preferred in the Janácek Quartets, and I select their recent Calliope accounts partly because they offer the superb Schulhoff First Quartet as coupling.