Hot on the heels of the Tippett Quartet’s marvellous recent disc of Penderecki’s complete string quartets comes this superb account from the Silesian Quartet. It’s impossible to say which is preferable, so authoritative are both recordings, so it comes down to details. I find, for example, that the Tippett Quartet’s recording has more depth and richness in the sound, whereas the Silesian disc favours the upper registers more. This is as true of the athletic pizzicato of the First Quartet (1960) as it is of the expressionistic lines of Der unterbrochene Gedanke, from 28 years later, but this is not a question of suggesting that one is somehow ‘better’ than the other, merely that the approaches differ.

The deciding factor may be in the listener’s preference for either the String Trio (Tippet Quartet) or the Clarinet Quartet (Silesian Quartet), but this is again a decision fraught with difficulty. Piotr Szymyślik's clarinet weaves in and out of the string trio with superbly judged blend and exemplary control, but the Trio is also an intriguing work, in spite of its brevity. However, it was the Quartet that marked, in 1993, a real turn towards chamber music in Penderecki’s late work, as Tim Rutherford-Johnson points out in his notes, and in that respect is possibly of greater interest than the enigmatic Trio.

The Silesians really outdo themselves in the questing Fourth Quartet, which is also brief but seems to be much more than the sum of its parts, venturing into the most disparate vocabularies (and they are certainly more idiomatic than the Tippetts in the folky second movement). I suspect that the only solution is to buy both recordings.