In both these recordings of Berg’s Lyric Suite, there’s no mistaking the players’ relish for the technical and expressive challenges the music presents. With such a supremely self-conscious piece, the last thing a performance needs is to get bogged down in the many intricate details of a score which, while brilliantly conceived for the instruments, still puts formidable interpretative hurdles in the players’ path.

Each performance has things to recommend it, but the New Zealand Quartet are less sympathetically recorded than the Psophos. This makes it hard to tell whether moments of less than ideal balance arise through misjudgements by players or engineers –though I suspect the latter. It’s also clear at the outset of Berg’s early Op 3 Quartet that, while the music is projected with a good sense of flow, even greater attention to dynamic detail is needed for the full drama of the music to emerge. Nor do the New Zealanders manage a convincing continuity in Op 3’s second movement, though the music itself – constantly firing off in new and ever more extravagant directions – renders that task supremely difficult.

The Psophos’s sound in the Lyric Suite is just that crucial degree warmer, the balance more open, the principal voices unfailingly clear even in the most complex textures. The only problem is a touch of self-consciousness, a sense of emotional contrivance rather than of absolutely natural and unforced expressiveness. This feeling is carried over from a distinctly fulsome rendering of Webern’s early Langsamer Satz. Fortunately, the Psophos hit the ideal balance between spontaneity and control in an expert reading of Schoenberg’s Fourth Quartet. Even in the elusive second movement there’s no sense of relentlessness or strain, while the slow movement’s dramatic alternations between declamatory assertiveness and contemplative restraint are perfectly judged.

With luck the Quatuor Psophos will now record more Schoenberg, as well as some mature Webern. Meanwhile, for a reminder of where Viennese chamber music stood before the explosion created by Schoenberg and his pupils, the New Zealand Quartet offer a polished and genial account of Wolf’s Italian Serenade.