Brahms followed Mozart’s lead in adding a second viola to the string quartet line-up for his two string quintets, rather than opting for the extra cello favoured by Schubert and Boccherini. For Mozart this offered a range of melody instruments and sub-groups drawn from the expanded chamber ensemble, whereas Brahms revelled in the richness such bulking-out in the mid-range afforded him. The two string quintets (1882 and 1890) are essentially sunny creations, conceived during happy times in Bad Ischl, a summer retreat much favoured by the composer. The First Quintet strikes a characteristic Brahmsian balance between economy and expansiveness, telescoping slow movement and scherzo into the single span of the central variations, and framing this with the autumnal, Schubertian unfolding of the opening Allegro non troppo and the Beethovenian contrapuntal discursiveness of the final Allegro energico. Brahms conceived the Second Quintet as his final work (its opus number – 111 – is a coincidence he would surely have wryly enjoyed), until the artistry of clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld persuaded him back to the composer’s desk. In one of the most striking openings in all chamber music, upper-string sirens blaze off in hot pursuit of a drive-by cello solo. The slow movement and waltzish intermezzo are in Brahms’s elegiac mode, while the finale demonstrates his love of Hungarian gypsy music.

The Nash Ensemble are nothing less than the London regiment of chamber music’s crack troops and they yield nothing in interpretative power and consistency of concentration to the Hagen Quartet and Gérard Caussé, the comparison favoured in the Gramophone Classical Music Guide. Both discs present this joyful, compelling music in its best light; the Nash are recorded with a touch more immediacy.