If you’re sitting still at the end of Brahms’s First Piano Quartet, with its madcap, almost parodistic Hungarian gypsy finale, then something’s wrong. Certainly this new recording sets the feet going right from the off, its Presto marking observed with aplomb. This is the first recording from this fine Russian-German line-up but you wouldn’t know it from the confidence of their collective playing. Other highlights in the First Quartet are an eerie Intermezzo and a flowing Andante, effortlessly phrased. By comparison, Capuçon/Caussé/Angelich are on the slow side, though irresistibly effulgent. Hamelin and the Leopold, closer in speed to the new recording, balance piano and string textures with great refinement and no one plays that gypsy finale more thrillingly; Ian Brown of the Nash is, by comparison, just a little polite.

The Onyx and Hyperion sets were recorded just two years apart (in 2007 and 2005 respectively) and have in common violinist Marianne Thorsen and viola player Lawrence Power, yet it’s striking how much more yearning the slow movement of the Third Quartet sounds in the Hyperion recording, the great cello melody beautifully wrought by Kate Gould, Thorsen then duetting with her with great subtlety. By comparison, the Naxos players seem to be a little self-conscious, the phrases not following as easily as in the finest accounts; in the preceding Scherzo, too, I found the fiendish chordal piano-writing a touch opaque compared to Angelich. But the outer movements fare better, the new group particularly impressive in the many passages of heightened anguish in the first and the almost orchestral richness of the climaxes in the finale.

In the end, though, this new recording doesn’t topple those on Hyperion and Virgin in my affections.