How do you like your Bartók quartets served? With precision, passion, a sense of mystery or a sense of humour? With spontaneity or with a pinch of paprika? All options are catered for on disc, some, like the Takács Quartet (on Hungaroton, 12/84, or, preferably, on Decca, 4/98), the Belcea Quartet (Warner Classics, 5/08), the Mikrokosmos Quartet (Hungaroton) and now Quatuor Diotima offering a balanced blend of all the principal ingredients. Among the tried-and-tested my personal favourites are the Végh Quartet (their second recording, also on Naïve, 8/01), who combine intelligence with local flavouring, though not always as forceful or as tight ensemble-wise as my other favourite vintage set, the ‘middle’ Juilliard Quartet recording (Retrospective, 4/02). The Véghs suggest a blend of earth and air, rather more so than their feted Hungarian predecessors on disc, the Hungarian Quartet (DG), respected though they are. None of these will seriously disappoint.

Prior to the Diotima the last set to come my way was by the Arcadia Quartet (Chandos, 11/18), an extremely fine run of performances sympathetically reviewed in these pages by Richard Bratby. But put on the opening of the Third Quartet and the Arcadia’s relatively plain exegesis is in my view quite upstaged by this Quatuor Diotima version, where you sense four visitors newly landed on a strange planet, each glancing at the other in wonderment at what they are seeing. In addition to the prescribed glissandos, the Diotimas employ portamento which, given that the music dates from a period when portamento was widely employed, is appropriate. In the coda of the same works the Diotima call on a wider range of dynamics than the Arcadia and the dive bombing cello line makes more of an impact, while in the second movement of the Second Quartet the Diotima capture the kitsch mood of the mock ‘popular ballad’ halfway through. They’re similarly tongue-in-cheek in the ‘banjo-and-fiddle’ episode 3'53" into the Sixth Quartet’s second movement, a passage marked Rubato – Animato, molto agitato. Then again, their lightning inflections in the swift, muted coda of the Second Quartet’s second movement suggest nocturnal panic in the insect world, an image that Bartók himself – a great lover of insect life – may well have had in mind when he wrote the piece.

But not everything goes the Diotima’s way. In the Fifth Quartet’s finale the sudden switch from rugged aggression to a witty minuet send-up near the close of the movement (marked Allegretto, con indifferenza, 5'55") needs just a tad more breathing space. Here the Arcadia Quartet employ finer judgement, as they do at the lento pianissimo close of the Sixth Quartet’s first movement, where Quatuor Diotima seem merely to shrug off one of Bartók’s most touching episodes. The Arcadia keep a tighter rhythmic hold on the Fourth Quartet’s wildly warring finale (a strong sense of rhythm is a virtue throughout their set), though Quatuor Diotima certainly capture the spirit.

So swings and roundabouts, I’d say, but at the final reckoning this new set shows the fuller appreciation of Bartók’s sound palette, its heady combination of profundity, invention, wit, vivid tone-colouring and searing emotion (specifically in the later works). Were you to chance upon these recordings of the quartets before any others, you’d have the whole picture to hand, more or less.