Adding Ravel’s G major Violin Sonata to the common quartet coupling is a confident move on the part of Hyperion, which has previously featured the ensemble in less familiar music by Franck and Fauré (10/08). It also follows the incendiary readings of Quatuor Ebène, who picked up last year’s Recording of the Year for their troubles. The Dante are less sonorous than their French counterparts in the Debussy, but then so are most quartets, and the way melodies seem to emerge subtly from the texture before retreating back into it is most appealing. The Dante are a few degrees cooler than the Ebène, closer to the Hagen in their approach, and it’s the filigree writing that’s to the fore in their reading, with some particularly fine cello playing from Bernard Gregor-Smith in the first movement. In the pizzicato-rich second movement the Dante are less explosive than the Ebène, more in line with received wisdom on how this movement should progress. But it’s in the slow movement that the Ebène really come into their own, carving each phrase out of the air to almost unbearably poignant effect. The Dante find beauty here but it’s altogether less strange, and less compelling. The Ravel Quartet, too, is unfailingly musical, a more comfortable listen than the Ebène’s or even the Hagen’s sternly neo-classical reading. How you respond will depend very much on your take on this music.

For the Ravel sonata, Krysia Osostowicz is joined by Simon Crawford-Phillips. It’s an interpretation that delights in Ravel’s details, in the shading of a phrase, in the articulation of his semiquavers. But for me, the more interventionist Renaud Capuçon and Frank Braley get away from the rather uptight image we have of Ravel to compelling effect, be it in the seedy nightclub atmosphere of the inner movement or the Stravinskian acerbity of the finale.