Oh, dear! A full-price CD which runs for a meagre 55 minutes and includes just four of Rossini’s youthfully engaging Sonate a quattro, omitting two of the most genial. As the excellent Hyperion team has demonstrated, it is possible to get all six sonatas on a single CD, though probably not at these tempi. Which brings me to a second, somewhat less censorious, ‘Oh, dear!’ – the curiously intense playing style of Ensemble Explorations. Keats said he hated poetry which has a palpable design on us. He also said, ‘Give me books, fruit, French wine, fine weather and a little music out of doors, played by somebody I do not know.’ Alas, the design of these performances is all too palpable and we are very conscious of who is playing, Ensemble Explorations being the only string quartet I have yet come across with a named ‘director’ (the cellist Roel Dieltiens). Much as one might relish the intensity and shapeliness of the playing (the manner is that of musicians tackling late Beethoven or mature Schubert), a touch more youthful insouciance would not have gone amiss.

Still, it’s different. Rossini, I guess, would have been tickled pink by the performances – just 12 years old and already being treated like the greatest composer in the history of the world! Wicked. The recordings are superb, ripe and immediate.