A piece or performance of Janáček tends to impress us by means of unfiltered expression. To look for hidden depths is to miss the point. The music lives on its raw nerves, and while the members of the Escher Quartet may not speak Czech – they are American, counting the Emersons as their mentors – their success at dramatising the stories-without-words of both quartets is much aided by exceptionally vivid studio engineering, achieved by Thore Brinkmann at Potton Hall.

After all, Janáček does not rewrite Tolstoy in the First, or his own unreciprocated passions in the Second. He makes music from them, a music on the edge of language to be sure, straining at the leash of abstraction, in a universalised state neatly symbolised on the album cover by the Melancholy Highwaymen of Mikuláš Galanda. Passages such as the tinder-dry tremolo moments of the First Quartet and the rubato-recitative of its third movement get under the skin of both music and listener, whether experienced on speakers or headphones. Even native ensembles such as the Pavel Haas Quartet (Supraphon, 11/06) sound muted by comparison with the Eschers.

The direct translation of human experience to the quartet medium is Janáček’s legacy to his pupil Haas, and here the high-finish intensity of the Eschers’ playing brings the Monkey Mountains Quartet into the mainstream of 1920s European modernism without minimising its peculiarly Czech hesitations and surges of phrase. Haas may have thought better of the percussion effects in the ‘Wild Night’ finale but they crash the quartet party with the Nielsen-like rude humour of uninvited guests, again more convincingly so than Colin Currie’s contribution to the discreetly balanced PHQ version. The mother of all hangovers is left to our imaginations.