The third volume of the Carducci Quartet’s Shostakovich cycle pairs two of the mightiest of the 15. Both the five-movement Ninth and the six-movement Fifteenth play continuously, and both trace a wide unbroken arc of experience. At the same time, they could hardly be more opposite in character: the Ninth being one of the most demonstrative of all Shostakovich’s works, above all in its astonishing 719-bar finale, and the Fifteenth being one of the most cryptic and introverted, with its unrelenting slow unfolding and lacerating outbursts.

As before, the Carducci’s performances are scrupulously prepared and musically persuasive, yet rather narrower in expressive range than this music demands. The opening movement of the Ninth is melancholy enough but misses the anxiously premonitory tone that would link it effectively with the rest; the second movement is nicely flowing but insufficiently plangent; the third not very driven; the fourth not ‘sticky’ enough in the way it gets from one note to the next. The ending of the finale is certainly not ‘half-hearted’ (the booklet’s strange description for a summatory fortissisimo that grinds major and minor modes together), but I could do without its conventional rhetorical slowing.

The valedictory Fifteenth Quartet is ideally heard live, at the end of a complete cycle, with an audience spellbound by its agonised long journey through the circles of hell. The finest performances convey a sense of what is not happening as much as what is: the fearsome constraints on physical motion while brain and soul are still firing on all cylinders. The Carduccis do not push the music to such extremes, and no doubt there is room for performances such as theirs that look for virtues other than communicative intensity. Certainly they make their case with expertise and poise.