The Quatuor Cambini-Paris have so far tended to focus on the more esoteric areas of the quartet repertoire – notably Jadin and Félicien David (7/12). But here they fling themselves into a crowded arena and, even among period instrument groups, there’s no lack of competition.

They’re keen to convey the sheer breadth of Mozart’s ‘Haydn’ Quartets, grasping every opportunity to demonstrate his daringly bold writing. In the opening of the Dissonance, for instance, they luxuriate in the extraordinary harmonic tension; similarly, they set a deliberate pace in the slow movement, underlining its hymnic quality. Turn to the Chiaroscuro and their ongoing cycle on Aparte and you get a quite different approach: they set off at a faster pace which generates more tension precisely because of its momentum – that and a rawness that comes from the most sparing use of vibrato. Then in the slow movement they offer a more conversational tone, while the Minuet is more natural-sounding in terms of dynamics. In the finale, Ibragimova is more sweet-toned than the leader of the new set. This new recording also captures the players very close, which means every breath and extraneous noise is caught, which may prove distracting to some.

Again, in K428 there’s plenty of expressivity and character in this new reading; however, the Mosaïques endow the first movement with a more febrile unease, while the Chiaroscuro offer a wistfully withdrawn quality, and it is contrasts in phrasing as much as in dynamics that make their reading compelling. In the slow movement, too, they have a rapt sensitivity, compared to which the Cambini-Paris can sound lurid in their use of hairpin dynamics. But the Minuet has an engaging boisterousness in the new version (here I find the Mosaïques too slow). The finale requires nerves of steel: the Cambini-Paris set a great pace but the first violin’s semiquavers are not as fastidiously realised as in the Chiaroscuro’s reading; nor, for that matter, compared to the benchmark Hagen reading.

The same trends can be found elsewhere in the set. The opening of K421 lacks the desperate edge that others find, while the Chiaroscuro impart a delicious story-telling quality to the variations of the finale, where the Cambini-Paris are several degrees less finely nuanced. And in the Hunt, K458, they can’t quite match the one-in-a-bar quality that makes the Mosaïques so infectious, while the Adagio once again falls victim to an overly spacious tempo and exaggerated dynamics in the new reading.

If there were no other period-instrument groups in this repertoire this would make for an interesting addition to the catalogue, but they are, alas, outclassed by the Mosaïques and, even more so, the Chiaroscuro’s as-yet incomplete series.