What can I say? This is just a fantastic recording. It sounds great, the playing is erudite and courageous, and it’s quite simply the best thing I’ve heard all year.

The Walton really stands out for me. The Albion capture the turbulence, the wistful lyricism enmeshed with searing tension that is evoked in Walton’s writing. The opening is absolutely captivating, with the Albion’s tone simultaneously honeyed and scintillating, at times electric. The many swooping portamentos are not only appropriate for the period but echo the first recording of this piece by the Hollywood Quartet, with which Walton is said to have been very pleased.

The romantic lyricism of the surging and receding phrases is so well paced, and every detail is carefully weighed and placed. The viola is often the star of the show, not only in Walton’s writing but through Ann Beilby’s rich and poignant timbres. The pairings of Tamsin Waley-Cohen’s and Emma Parker’s violin lines often make one hold one’s breath, either from the sheer drama of the stormy passages or from the delicate subtlety of the more tender moments. And Nathaniel Boyd’s cello line manages in turn to insinuate itself, join in with beguiling guttural interjections or ground and support the almost orchestral textures.

The Walton is paired here with Shostakovich’s Third Quartet because both were completed in 1946. As Roger Parker explains in the notes, this post-war year was one of ‘conflicting emotions’: of relief, mourning and new anxieties, not the least of which was about what was happening to Europe with the drawing across of what Churchill was to dub the Iron Curtain. It seems poignant that the Albion Quartet could not have known to what extent some of these themes and tensions in Europe were to resurface by the time their album was released this autumn.

In typical fashion, Shostakovich opens with a jaunty and sunny mood, which we cannot trust to be genuine, and as is his wont soon shows his cynical side. As he descends into the shadows, the Albion dutifully follow.

The contrasts here are excellently portrayed and so starkly painted that we are on the edge of our seats most of the time. The folk-inspired opening of the Moderato con moto is pulled and dragged from the strings, and the deeply unsettling pointillistic texture of the second section, moving into the sliding and bending lines towards the end, are all eerie in the extreme. The Albion here often produce such vast and resplendent sonorities, and yet the detail is nevertheless ever-present – the engineering and production team deserve special mention for capturing this exceptional sonic experience.

The architecture and pacing throughout this album are so well judged, and the excruciating yet exhilarating journey through these musical and emotional states captures the dichotomy of those times – and these times – so well. For this the Albion deserve high praise indeed.