After their impressive traversal of the Górecki quartets (6/11), the Royal Quartet return with two further seminal Polish figures. Penderecki’s string quartets throw the distinction between his earlier and later output into sharp relief. The initial two works are brief one-movement pieces reflecting current European developments: the First (1960) explores a wide range of timbres and textures over its series of unrelated ‘panels’, while the Second (1968) deploys the ‘sonorism’ then prevalent in Poland in music whose formal coherence is achieved almost in spite of its expressive fragmentation. Four decades on and the Third Quartet (2008), also in a single movement, reflects the pluralist idiom its composer had steadily been evolving – the more extended span taking in alternately elegiac and sardonic elements with an underlying sense of ideas being developed and transformed that places this work in a closer relationship to the classical archetype.

If none of these pieces ranks among Penderecki’s most significant, the same is hardly applicable to Lutosławski’s String Quartet (1964) which, coming after a period of overt experimentation, adopts a ground-plan of ‘introductory movement’ and ‘main movement’ that was to serve the composer well over the ensuing three decades. Moreover, its realisation as a sequence of four interdependent ‘mobiles’ (there being no actual full score) tests the ensemble’s powers of co ordination to the limit – the initial teasing out of subtle detail leading straight into music whose powerful expressive charge is then carried over into a prolonged leave-taking, with its vestigial allusion to previous and now only dimly remembered events.

Whatever this music’s challenges, the emotional disparities of Penderecki or the relative abstractions of Lutosławski, the Royal Quartet meet them head on. In the former composer, the Dafô Quartet offer more visceral if less refined listening while, in the latter, the Silesian Quartet offer comparable technical finesse but a less involving experience. Spacious and immediate sound, along with informative booklet-notes: those for whom the present coupling appeals should not hesitate.