Here is a fascinating galaxy of Italian music for string quartet, opening with a work from a German composer, Hugo Wolf. He was more famous for Lieder but he truly ‘moved south’ to capture the Italian spirit in his delectable seven-minute crystallisation of the character of the string quartet, sparklingly rhythmic and full of warmth. Puccini’s Crisantemi is a moving threnody full of the expressive feeling and flowing lyricism one finds in his operatic music (indeed, he quoted from it in the fourth act of Manon Lescaut) and this is perhaps the finest work he wrote for strings alone. Verdi’s String Quartet was composed to demonstrate his ability to write confidently in the idiom of chamber music. Its four movements are full of structural skill, vitality and melodic appeal (especially the opening Allegro and the finale, complete with an accomplished fugue). The Andante is delicately charming, the Scherzo full of energetic invention.

With Turina’s La oración del torero, we are taken immediately to the sultry atmosphere of Spain, not the all-but-picture-postcard imagery evoked so skilfully by French composers. Turina went to Paris as a student and came back determined to create a genuinely Spanish school of music. The Toreador’s Prayer is a haunting example. It apparently came to Turina like a vision, while he was actually watching a bullfighter praying before entering the bullring. The Argentinian composer Astor Piazzolla also studied in Paris, under the influential Nadia Boulanger, who suggested he incorporate the tango into his music. Not surprisingly, his Four, for Tango creates a completely different, more ‘modern’ but still idiomatic sound world full of pulsing rhythms.

Our concert ends with a move to Genoa and the music of Nicolò Paganini, who was more concerned with demonstrating the virtuosity of the violin than creating atmospheric evocations. The pair of Caprices from Op 1 offered here (transcribed most effectively for string quartet) are climaxed with the famous No 24, one of the most famous virtuoso works for solo violin. However, No 6, marked Lento, which comes first (as a surprise), is quite different: gentle, full of rich, evocative feeling.

Not unexpectedly, the performances by the Brodsky Quartet are full of spontaneously imaginative insights and equal to all the diverse demands of these six composers. They are fortunate to receive a vividly real recording from Chandos, perhaps a trifle close in balance but creating a convincing impression of four players sitting at the end of one’s room.