This is a genuinely remarkable disc. I say this not from any association of its contents with current events, but simply because both performances and recording are so good; though naturally the horrific events unfolding as I write this bring the pieces recorded here even more alive.

We begin with Schnittke’s String Quartet No 3, from 1985. It is a work of tremendous power, polystylistic in its use of quotations from Lassus, Beethoven and Shostakovich, but with that singleness of purpose and intensity of emotional trajectory that characterise the best of the composer’s work. The Netherlands-based Matangi Quartet seize the music by the scruff of the neck, every chord at whatever dynamic level vibrant with expectation. The four players are adept not only at switching from one dramatic register to another but at maintaining a thread of narrative tension, something of huge importance in performing Schnittke in order that the music seem more than merely a sequence of contrasting moments. That is particularly evident in the continual resurfacing of the cadential motif from Lassus’s Stabat mater, which become more shocking in its modal-tonal purity the more it is heard in this increasingly chromatic soundscape.

Silvestrov, who is Ukrainian and has now found refuge in Germany, as did a good number of his contemporaries from the former Soviet Union, has become relatively feted in the West for his more recent work, a ‘postludial’ style that revisits the musical past as though hearing it through a muffling veil: fragments shored up against ruin. His single-movement String Quartet No 1 was written in 1974, and while it predates this ‘postludial’ style, its origins are clearly to be heard. A theme that functions as a kind of chorale is the music’s basis, but it undergoes a series of transformations that take it into some highly unexpected territory, in which terms such as ‘consonance’ and ‘dissonance’, among many others, seem to lose their meaning. The highly nostalgic tone will be immediately recognisable to anyone familiar with the composer’s Fifth or Seventh Symphonies, for example. Once again, it is a work of huge dramatic and dynamic variation, and the Matangi are absolutely equal to all of this; the final couple of minutes are absolutely spine-chilling.

To finish this recording with Shostakovich’s highly autobiographical Quartet No 8 is inspired, and brings together many of the unmentioned threads that tie these three works together, connected as it is with censorship and personal (artistic) identity and its relationship with political power. Always a powerful piece, it positively glows in this performance. The recording quality, thanks to the infallible ear of Bert van der Wolf, brings out every detail of their playing throughout. A truly outstanding release.