The Dudok Quartet Amsterdam enjoy a healthy Tchaikovsky lineage. They studied with Marc Danel, whose Quatuor Danel in turn studied in Moscow with the Borodin Quartet, absolute masters of this repertoire, which they recorded multiple times with various personnel. This album is the first issue in the Dudok’s cycle for Rubicon and contains the first two string quartets and an arrangement of Lensky’s aria from Eugene Onegin. It’s a massive disappointment.

There seems to be a desire, in the recording itself and the PR puffery surrounding its release, to present Tchaikovsky’s music as edgy. ‘There’s the Tsarist Tchaikovsky, the Soviet Tchaikovsky, the nationalist and the bourgeois Tchaikovsky, there’s the Tchaikovsky of the biographies, the Tchaikovsky of the musicologists, right up to the modern LGBT Tchaikovsky’, we are told in Maxim Februari’s essay. ‘And there’s the Dudok Quartet Amsterdam, sitting in a rehearsal room to say something that is musically sincere.’ If they believe in this music, they have a funny way of showing it.

Rubicon’s recording is very close and highlights an aggressive, angular tone in readings that make me doubt any love for Tchaikovsky’s music at all. In the first movement of the First Quartet alone, I noted instances where the markings dolce, leggiero and pianissimo in the score are barely observed, nor the instruction cantabile. At bar 51 (2'39"), they certainly meet Tchaikovsky’s sempre con fuoco request, but the music is spat out violently. Individual instruments can sound brittle and wiry, the cello husky. I don’t mind bracing string quartet-playing, but this is abrasive.

They take a flowing pace for the famous Andante cantabile, but the mutes don’t soften their buzzy tone, merely dull it, like wasps trapped in a jam jar. The Scherzo is best suited to the Dudok’s approach and it’s undeniably exciting, but it’s too percussive. Kudos to them for playing the repeat in the finale (which neither the Borodin nor the Danel take) but there’s little sense of playfulness to be heard. Tchaikovsky is beaten into submission.

The F major Quartet fares a little better, with a nicely rhapsodic opening, but the Scherzo – too slow – sounds unsteady and the scamper for the finishing tape in the finale is again aggressive. It’s worth sampling to test if I’m being over-prickly. I’m sure the close recording has done the Dudoks few favours here, but at this stage, their Tchaikovsky cannot hold a candle to the Borodins or the Quatuor Danel.