The Kuss Quartet’s new record, ‘Thème russe’, consists mostly of a number of appetising morsels, not so much a meal as hors d’oeuvres (or zakuski, in the circumstances). Typically, the ‘Russian Folksong’ on which variations were written by 10 of the composers who used to gather at the home of the publisher Mitrofan Belyayev on Friday evenings was really by Rimsky-Korsakov. He himself contributes one of the best, ingenious and imaginatively scored. Scriabin writes one with a neat pizzicato counterpoint, Felix Blumenfeld one with more pizzicato (presumably they had the balalaika in mind). Alexander Winkler manages to wrest a fugue out of the subject. The Latvian Ja¯zeps Vı¯tols is the most harmonically enterprising. Nikolay Sokolov is entrusted with the finale, winding things up with zest. The best of the lot is the Andante cantabile by Victor Ewald, civil engineer and cellist of the Belyayev Quartet, a piece perhaps alluding to Tchaikovsky and not unworthy of him.

Stravinsky is represented by a brief piece he wrote at short notice and to a useful commission from Alfred Pochon, one of the Flonzaley Quartet; no masterpiece, it shows him beginning to flex (or twitch) his neo-classical muscles as the 1920s dawned. He is in turn mourned with an elegiac Canon in his memory by Alfred Schnittke. Tchaikovsky himself increasingly takes over the record, with arrangements of his Album for the Young, ingeniously transferred from piano to string quartet by Rostislav Dubinsky (founding first violin of the Borodin Quartet). And Tchaikovsky provides the only substantial work, his First Quartet, played with a lively dance lilt in the Scherzo and a gentle eloquence with the arrangement of a genuine Ukrainian folksong, the Andante cantabile which famously drew tears from Tolstoy.