Here is another relatively new quartet plunging into the recording fray with “high end” repertory and reaping the rewards of their apparent fearlessness. Ligeti’s two numbered quartets require feats of individual virtuosity to be combined with the kind of effortless coordination that sounds utterly spontaneous. The slightest lapse creates chaos, and perhaps the greatest compliment one can pay the Parker Quartet is that, whatever false starts and shambolic episodes occurred during rehearsals, the recordings have the conviction and character of single takes: these performances might just as well be “live”.

The disc aims to satisfy completists by including the two movements from 1950 whose polite, occasionally quirky neo-classicism gives little hint of the Ligetian eruptions to come. The Andante and Allegretto also steer clear of Bartók, a challenging model for any aspiring Hungarian composer in the Communist era: and the most remarkable aspect of the first quartet “proper” (1953-54) is its knowing transference of the clichés of Bartókian night-music into the kind of alarmingly comic nightmares that Ligeti would soon make his own.

Fourteen years later, with Hungary abandoned and the full potential of the modern musical West confronted, the nightmares were less comic, more seriously scary. As with much music constructed as a collection of technical studies, it’s hard for interpreters of the Second Quartet to get behind the spectacular sound effects to expose ideas of genuine substance. The Parkers manage this as well as any of their more seasoned predecessors – the LaSalle (DG, 12/06), the Arditti (Sony, 1/97) – and make one eager to hear more contemporary repertory from them, especially when so efficiently recorded and at super-budget price.