The prospect of Adolf Busch writing quartets is an enticing one for any listener curious to hear inside the mind of a great interpreter. The pieces here hold an oblique fascination much like the contemporary works of Furtwängler and Schnabel, in that the music of all three men shares qualities with the recreative side of their identities as it centres on their unparalleled performances of Beethoven.

Accordingly, the innocuous title and brevity of the Nine Pieces, Op 45, from the early 1930s, conceals a suite of genre sketches and a continuous thread of expression that could hardly have been written without the example of Beethoven’s Op 131. A slow introduction, laden with pathos, says everything necessary in under two minutes, then subtly modulates into a muted little Allegretto, then a spiky contrapuntal Scherzetto and so on, all leading to a fugue of steadily accumulating momentum.

While Busch’s writing for quartet is a pleasure in its own right – far surpassing in lightness and transparency the example of his teacher Reger in this regard – the effect of the Pieces here surely owes a good deal to the first-class recording and playing of the Sarastro Quartet: bang in tune just as Busch demanded of himself and his colleagues, and achieving remarkable parity between the four musicians.

Harmonically tougher, the String Quartet, Op 57 (1942) again rewards close and repeated listening because the obvious models for style and melodic contour are so thoroughly assimilated rather than merely emulated. All three movements know when to stop; Busch never labours the point, any more than he did as a violinist.

Busch wrote the Flute Quintet in 1952 in the months before his death and dedicated it to his wife Hedwig, an amateur flautist, but while the half-hour duration and broadly conceived outer movements belie assumptions about the carefree and divertimento-like nature of the genre, there is no mark of last things on the piece, unless you count a spirit of serene equanimity as the sign of a life lived well. Again, flautist Dimitri Vecchi and his Sarastro colleagues make the most inviting case for investigation. You will be hard-pressed (or fortunate) to make a lovelier chamber-music discovery this year.