When Beethoven shares the theme of Op 131’s Andante between the two violins, it’s like two friends, not always but on this occasion in agreement, finishing the other’s sentences. That’s how the Mirò Quartet play it, so do the Takács. The Danish String Quartet fiddles phrase like Gemini: you would have to be following the score, or listening very intently on good equipment, to hear the theme pass between them. The same principle of tonal matching across all four instruments holds for the quartet’s opening fugue, smooth and yet frozen like the ice supporting Schubert’s hurdy-gurdy man – as though, after the Grosse Fuge, the nature of the genre as a carrier of argument had changed for ever.

This is how I hear the members of the DSQ approaching the 20th-century composers who picked up the gauntlet of late Beethoven for themselves: Nielsen (on Dacapo, 7/07), Shostakovich (in the first volume of this ‘Prism’ series, 12/18) and Bartók, in this exquisite account of the First Quartet. Some may find them aloof and measured by the side of the Takács, but for me the DSQ open the curtain on the kind of private world Schoenberg discovered in breathing ‘the air of other planets’ in his Second Quartet. The engineering, too, creates the illusion of a limitless black space from which Bartók’s central Allegretto emerges at first indistinct and then hurtling towards us like some not-so-heavenly body on grainy footage from a spaceship camera.

The C sharp minor Fugue of Bach is well placed as an encore, at once affording relief by retreating into yet another alien world, yet retrospectively handing us the melodic key to Op 131 and inviting us to turn again and repeat the course. On a second time around, or fourth or fifth, the mellifluous purity of the DSQ’s intonation becomes less an object of admiration in itself than a means to enjoy the playful negotiation of the prefatory third and sixth movements, the patient humour of the Andante’s variations – with a wonderfully timed pay-off, hardly more than a smile – and even the finale’s gritty Schubertian tarantella. In the DSQ’s company, I’ll be content to go round in contrapuntal circles for some time to come.