Schubert’s Rosamunde and Death and the Maiden create one of the starkest pairings of string quartets, displaying startling contrasts and contradictions, despite having been written consecutively within a very short time of each other – all of which down to Schubert’s intervening illness and the revelation that he was dying. Although the Doric Quartet’s performance of the Rosamunde Quartet skilfully manages to be gently lyrical at the same time as exposing its underlying mercurial temperament, the far more forbidding shadows of desolation and fear are never far from their performance of Death and the Maiden. Here, they explode into exultations of an impotent rage one would more normally associate with Beethoven and which completely refute the idea that Schubert was in any way weak-willed or insipid in character.

The Dorics have enormous flair for this kind of music, getting comfortably under the skin of music written by Schubert when he was about the same as their average age and displaying a similar degree of maturity and insight: here, more than anything, they bring out the honesty and relief of a composer driven to express his real feelings when much of his output was acutely at odds with his ill health and depression. That they do all this so well with Death and the Maiden may slightly devalue the Rosamunde on this recording; but if it has to act as a foil to make their performance of the later quartet so monumental, then so be it.