When the Yggsdrasil Quartet’s pioneering disc of Jón Leifs’s three string quartets was released by BIS in 1995, I gave it a resoundingly warm welcome. Listening to their performances again (as I have from time to time in the intervening 19 years) only deepens my appreciation of these marvellously polished accounts of the Icelander’s rough-hewn inspirations, the first two of which are rooted in tragedy.

This new account is in most respects no less affecting. The quartet of the Reykjavík Chamber Orchestra are expert players and treat the sometimes awkward-sounding idiom as if it were the most natural style on the planet – but then leader Rut Ingólfsdóttir is a leading exponent of Leifs’s music. Their accounts are uniformly swifter than their BIS rivals, too, by respectively three, six and seven minutes. This gives Leifs’s music a lightness and vitality that set its darker passages in stronger relief, most acutely in the Second, Vita et mors (1948 51), one of four compositions inspired by the accidental death of his estranged 17 year-old daughter, Líf. Vita et mors is her portrait (‘líf’, like ‘vita’, means ‘life’) from childhood to the brink of maturity. Its thematic ties with the heart-rending unaccompanied choral lullaby Requiem (a howl of anguish sung sotto voce so as not to disturb the dead child) give the music an extra poignancy that should not leave a dry eye in the house.

The other quartets – the First (1939) a reaction to Europe’s ghastly slide into war, the Third (1965) a reaction to El Greco’s art – comprise major additions to the genre and are strong enough musically to be interpreted in such different ways. I am hard-put to choose between either set, whether in performance quality or sound. They will both sit proudly on my shelf