A couple of years ago the Gramophone Awards adopted a category for ‘Concept Album’ – ‘one designed to be heard through from beginning to end, the whole being elevated above its parts through the process of concentrated engagement’. The concept behind the Signum Quartet’s Schubert series – string quartets framed by song transcriptions – is so simple that I’m not sure it really counts.

Yet that definition certainly describes my response to this new release; remarkably so, when you consider that it’s centred on the Death and the Maiden Quartet – a work that tends to overpower everything in its immediate vicinity. That it doesn’t is due in part to the Signum’s ensemble sound: passionate, often brilliant, but also clear and lean, with vibrato thoughtfully used (listen to the way cellist Thomas Schmitz cuts through the texture in clean, glowing lines in the cello variation of the slow movement).

But it’s also down to the selection of songs (superbly transcribed, once again, by the group’s viola player Xandi van Dijk, who launches the melody of ‘Auf dem Wasser zu singen’ with a wonderfully understated lilt). How many ensembles would have pre-empted the D minor Quartet with the whole of ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’? The Signum Quartet give us a single brief extract as a sort of recitative introducing a reflective sequence of transcriptions.

Following the opening pair of songs, the early D major Quartet, D74, emerges from silence as if already under way; and after a D810 finale so swift that it feels genuinely dangerous, the closing ‘Schwanengesang’ seems more like a question mark than a peaceful resolution. Anyway, hear for yourself. Enjoyable purely as a recital on its own terms, it’s an album that repays careful and repeated listening.