Here’s an ingenious idea – a French string quartet album containing only one original work. The usual suspects are present – Debussy, Ravel and Fauré – plus a couple who might raise eyebrows: Satie and Poulenc (who famously withdrew his only, unsuccessful, string quartet). But they’re all represented by new transcriptions, variously made by Gildas Guillon, Jean-Christophe Masson and the Quatuor Van Kuijk’s viola player Emmanuel François.

And ravishingly made, too. ‘Pleasure is the key word’, says the violinist Sylvain Favre-Bulle, but dismiss any thought of Parisian frivolity. These are exquisite arrangements, avoiding the temptation to over-colour these brief (and mostly lyrical) piano works and songs. They stay within the stylistic parameters of these composers’ own chamber music, and the results feel entirely natural. You’d swear that Ravel originally conceived his Pavane for strings.

The Quatuor Van Kuijk bring them to life with endless subtlety and unforced, conversational playing, beautifully captured in transparent, intimate sound. Make no mistake, there’s pleasure here all right, but of a very sophisticated order.

Where things do perk up a bit (apart from the brisk, wry Poulenc sequence that opens the disc) is in the only original work on the album: a suite of five newly composed miniatures by Baptiste Trotignon, woven throughout the programme and each inspired (but not inhibited) by one of the five older composers. They’re witty, gorgeously crafted little works, unmistakably Trotignon’s own but making elegant play with fragments from the masters: a hint of Gymnopédie here, an echo of Clair de lune there. It’s hard to imagine them played with more finesse than they receive here, and that goes for the whole of this really rather lovely disc.