It’s many a year since I’ve heard string quartet-playing that’s more sheerly beautiful than this, whether in the sum of its parts or the parts themselves, while various interpretative decisions warrant applause. The first concerns repeats, most especially in the first movement, and if you’re a fan of the inconclusive rewrite finale (which, writing personally, I’m not) then you’ll be happy that the Ehnes Quartet include the exposition repeat there too. Beethoven baulked when the quartet’s first audience demanded that the two shortest movements (the second and fourth) be encored, obviously saddened that the bravest of his finales – the massive Grosse Fuge – had failed to engage them. Here, too, the Ehnes ensemble have method, their interpretation of the miniatures marking a contrast in mood between the swiftly scampering presto (with its vivid premonitions of Bartók’s teeming ‘night music’) and the relaxed, gently flowing Alla danza tedesca. As to whether you choose to close with the gnarled, fiercely argumentative Grosse Fuge or the cheery Allegro, both can work in context, the Fugue barging in rudely at the close of the Cavatina, then the Allegro welcoming us under a relatively clear sky.

The Cavatina itself is, in musical terms, pure heartbreak, where at one point the first violin sobs a passage marked beklemmt, meaning oppressed, stifled, heavy of heart, hardly able to connect one note to another – in a word ‘speechless’, yet desperate to voice emotion. Here the Ehnes Quartet, who choose a fairly swift tempo (6'50" to compare with, say, the Endellion Quartet at 7'54" or The Lindsays at 8'37") are consoling rather than emotionally draining: it’s very affectingly played but this is not music to brook compromise, at any level. And yet there are many ways to express Beethoven’s unique brand of heartache, and it could take up an entire issue of Gramophone to deal with just this one short passage in comparative versions of Op 130 (Richard Whitehouse’s Collection on page 94 gives a broader view).

People often ask me about the ‘greatest-ever performance’ of a particular work, even a single movement, and when it comes to the Cavatina from Op 130, it has to be the Busch Quartet, either their Columbia recording (now on Warner Classics, coming in at 7'13"), or even better their live recording (issued by Arbiter, 8'02"). In other respects, the Ehnes offer a performance that is vital, intelligently phrased, warmly textured and in most respects feelingly played. They attack the Grosse Fuge with colossal energy (there’s no let-up except where called for by Beethoven himself) and if you choose that as your ending you’ll find very little to complain about. The sound, produced by Simon Kiln, is superb.