This is the first comprehensive set of the music for string quartet by a composer whose notated yet completely silent anti-war statement In futurum (not part of this particular venture) anticipated John Cage’s 4'33" by more than 30 years. It’s an extraordinary traversal, beautiful, witty, unsettling and, as so often with Erwin Schulhoff, redolent of the Roaring Twenties, soon to roar out of control into one of the darkest periods in modern history, the composer himself being one of its tragic victims. The Alma Quartet is made up of players from the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, so one can expect, as a matter of course, a keen sense of musical interrelation.

The numbered quartets are perhaps the most accomplished works here, the First (1924) opening with a ferocious Presto con fuoco reminiscent of Hindemith at his most uncompromisingly precocious, then a wryly lilting Allegretto, an Allegro giocoso that toys with Bartókian dance rhythms and employs whistling harmonics, and the mysterious finale, nearly seven minutes of melancholy or agitated musing that’s not too far removed from the darker music in Prokofiev’s two quartets, the Second especially. Schulhoff’s own Second Quartet (1925) takes sustenance from the world of Smetana (the Piano Trio and The Bartered Bride), or seems to, whereas halfway through the Theme-and-variations second movement we’re thrown into a mirror-image Twenties dance music.

The Five Pieces date from 1923 and do the rounds of Vienna, Italy, the Czech Republic and Argentina, with music to match, the warmly seductive Alla tango milonga fourth movement being the most original. Bonus tracks feature three more miniatures, including a couple of military march ‘sketches’. But perhaps the most unexpected work is also the most expansive, the String Quartet ‘No 0’ in G, Op 25, Schulhoff’s first work to be published after the First World War and which runs the gamut, in stylistic terms, from Mozart through to Mahler, the latter most obviously in the Langsam second movement, which both recalls the finale of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony and anticipates the film music of Alfred Newman and Max Steiner.

The set closes with a seven-minute Divertimento, lighter fare than the other works in the set, it’s true, but highly enjoyable, the second movement Cavatine (with fleetingly coincidental premonitions of Walton’s Henry V film score, ie ‘Touch her soft lips and part’) showing the Alma Quartet capable of the most seductive playing. I expect much from them in the future, maybe Hindemith, Korngold, Walton, Prokofiev, even a Bartók cycle. As to rivals in this particular repertoire, the Aviv Quartet (Naxos) are very good in the first two quartets, and the Schulhoff Quartet in the First Quartet and Five Pieces (VMS), but I reckon that as an overall first recommendation for Schulhoff quartets this set shoots straight to the top. Excellent notes by Yoel Greenberg.