With so many Shostakovich quartet cycles in progress, the sequence must by now have overtaken Bartók’s as the 20th century’s most oft-recorded. Fortunately we live in an era of distinguished quartet-playing. As I sat down to listen to the Pacifica, a group equally at home in Mendelssohn and Elliott Carter, temperatures at its home base, Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music, were reaching unprecedented lows. Ironic really, for there’s nothing wrong with the series of which this disc forms the final instalment except perhaps the absence of that ultimate chill factor.

When the Fitzwilliam Quartet, the first British ensemble to take up the cause, worked with the composer himself on his radical Thirteenth Quartet, the experience left such a mark that the ensemble asked that there be no applause when they played the piece at public concerts. Since then we have had more technically inviolable renderings from the likes of the Emerson Quartet. This one makes a less belligerent impact. Japanese-Norwegian viola player Masumi Per Rostad is warm and clear, even elegant in his many important contributions, the recording itself spectacular only in its sheer naturalness.

It’s a similar story in the Fourteenth. For some this kind of ‘normalisation’ will disappoint, for all that the music never gets bogged down. If, like me, you can’t get the Borodin Quartet out of your head in this repertoire it might be worth remembering that the sumptuous tone, technical perfection and soloistic expressiveness, so well remembered from the group’s second survey (including Nos 14 and 15), are less evident in the more direct and intonationally suspect playing of the Beethoven Quartet, for whom the scores were actually written. In Bloomington you never lose the sense of four musicians playing together for pleasure.

I should mention the exceptionally full booklet-notes from Gerard McBurney. The ‘half-references and allusions’ he finds in the Fifteenth above all may or may not matter, whereas the music of Schnittke is nothing without them – in the case of the Third Quartet we have a meta-dialogue with Lassus and Beethoven as well as Shostakovich himself. The inclusion of carefully chosen Soviet-era makeweights ‘adding variety and perspective to the listening experience’ has been a hallmark of this excellent series and, although Schnittke’s score is not new to the lists, this re-contextualisation proves suitably provocative.