While Penderecki’s intimate relationship with string instruments is well known, his output for string quartet per se is curious, not least because of its brevity. The first two quartets (1960 and 1968) come in at just over six and just over eight minutes respectively, and then there is a huge gap before the Third (2008), at nearly 17, and the Fourth (2016) at, once again, slightly more than six minutes. But none of this is really of moment if one looks at the content – the first is almost Webernian in its concision, and the reality is that it does not need to be any longer than it is. The hyperactive quality of the material would not satisfactorily sustain a longer structure, and when it is performed with such breathtakingly virtuoso clarity as it is here, one wishes for no more and no less.

One can say much the same of the rather Ligetian Second, but of course Ligeti would indeed have made more of it – one feels that Penderecki was in something of a hurry, but it is still an impressive piece. With the Third, Leaves from an Unwritten Diary, we are in completely different stylistic territory, using far more traditional harmonic vocabulary but often in a very unexpected way. This is far from ‘neo-romanticism’, much though some of the gestures may suggest that direction, and there are even moments that suggest the late Shostakovich. As to the Fourth, as Richard Whitehouse says in his elucidative notes, the suggestion is of ‘what might have been’, because its brevity suggests something incomplete rather than a brief but fully formed structure, and the musical vocabulary leads one to expect it to be part of something of greater dimensions.

Complementing the numbered quartets are Die unterbrochene Gedanke (1988) and the String Trio (1990, rev 1991). The latter is even briefer than the shortest of the quartets and presents the listener with a kind of question mark. What could have become of this musical material had the composer elaborated it more, spent more time with it? No answer, of course, but the String Trio might be thought to be one, so phenomenally energetic is it. It is almost as though the composer were trying to return to the gestural nature of his much earlier music while remaining firmly anchored in tonality.

This massive stylistic range is negotiated with consummate skill by the Tippett Quartet – no easy task – and the recording by Michael Ponder, made in St John the Evangelist Church in Oxford, is absolutely outstanding, resonant but allowing every detail to be heard.