The Van Kuijk’s second disc of Mozart’s ‘Haydn’ Quartets builds on their growing reputation as one of the foremost young European ensembles and demonstrates that the BBC backed a winner by making this group one of its New Generation Artists (2015 17). Their playing once again exhibits fearlessness and pinpoint accuracy, deeply considered blend and a palpable joy in the colour palette available to the string quartet. They have been captured in ideal sound at the Teldex Studio in south west Berlin, miked to give a beautiful, atmospheric ‘ring’ while coming in close enough to make the listener aware of the human interactions with wooden instruments: the occasional up-beat sniff or snap of string on fingerboard.

An adherence (by and large) to Mozart’s dynamic and expression markings goes a long way towards defining the structure of these Viennese works. The occasional ‘inorganic’ intervention, too, heightens the characterisation: there’s a cheeky moment of sul ponticello towards the close of the Minuet of the G major Quartet (K387), and all four players clearly have fun pulling around the Scotch snaps of the Trio of the D minor (K421) or tripping through the incongruously light-hearted ‘third subject’ that punctures the wiry counterpoint of K387’s finale.

The jam in the sandwich is one of the three Divertimentos composed by the 16-year-old Mozart in Salzburg: not the ever-popular D major (K136) but the third of the set, in F. The Van Kuijk play it as if it’s every bit as deeply felt and finely wrought as the two mature works, lavishing the full glory of their tone on the outer movements and lingering in the slow movement just long enough to acknowledge that, even as a teenager, Mozart knew how to exploit aching dissonance to create a beguiling emotional and dramatic effect.