No masterpieces here but a pleasant enough collection. I found Bernard Herrmann’s Echoes.the most intriguing. He always wanted to be considered a serious composer and wasn’t satisfied with being merely a genius with films. Hitchcock aficionados may well find themselves creating mental images to match the moods of these evocative pieces and, since the work was published more than 40 years ago, it is to be hoped that other quartets may find their way to this concert piece by Herrmann at last.

George Antheil is unrecognisable as the self‑styled “bad boy of music” in this virtually unknown Third Quartet from 1948, a time when his wild youth was forgotten and he’d spent some years in Hollywood. These folksy tunes are not far from the English folksong school but it’s obviously the closely related American tradition in this case and, like much of Antheil, it’s full of gusto. Glass’s Second Quartet (1983) is from exactly the period of his opera Akhnaten with some of it in the same key – crumbs from the table – although compared with the opera it’s attractively concise.

Finally there’s a quartet by Ralph Evans, leader of the Fine Arts Quartet. It took him a long time, since he started it in 1966 and the second and third movements won NFMS prizes two years running. Thirty years later he added the opening movement and here it all is. Expertly played, like everything else here, but revealing this ensemble’s long commitment to Bartók.