The premise behind this album conjures up manifold possibilities, but the Navarra Quartet have devised an illuminating programme. Most perceptive are the ‘elegies’: that by Turina is a rapt if often fervent evocation of a toreador about to enter the bullring (and skilfully transcribed by the composer from the original for four lutes!), while that by Puccini commemorates a royal bereavement with a pathos that can easily seem mawkish in the more familiar arrangement for string orchestra. No less eloquently realised, the Kurtág pieces risk being submerged in this context – disquieting miniatures of an emotional import out of all proportion to their brevity.

Written almost a century apart, the two larger works viscerally embody those ‘love and death’ archetypes. The first three movements of the Janáček are sensitively rendered, but the finale lacks just that final degree of drama with which to bring the whole sequence implosively full circle. Nor does the opening Allegro (exposition repeat included) of the Schubert evince the necessary drama, yet the soulful ensuing variations are judiciously characterised and finely integrated. The Scherzo ideally elides truculence and wistfulness; the final Presto is vividly dispatched if not quite maintaining its initial impetus through to the fatefully decisive close.

An absorbing collection, then, on a par with the Navarra’s impressive release of Pēteris Vasks (5/11). Anyone familiar with incendiary readings of the Janáček and Schubert from the Pavel Haas Quartet (Supraphon, 11/06, 10/13) may find the present accounts a little underwhelming, though the Navarra’s insights have their own rewards, while the recording is a model of ‘quartet sound’.