This is what Szymanowski needs: firm, full-bodied playing, with a wide range of dynamic, colour and attack, and with all the unexpected twists and turns confidently negotiated. The Royal String Quartet are as finely tuned to his quirkiness (the rather stiff polytonality of the finale of the First Quartet, here delivered with admirable fleetness) as to his trademark voluptuous postimpressionism (a magical opening to the Second Quartet) and moments of mystic withdrawal or volatile transition (the finale of the Second Quartet, superbly flexible). In every way this comfortably outstrips the disappointing Schoenberg Quartet, making a persuasive bid for best available version.

Ludomir Rózycki was two years younger than Szymanowski, with whom he co-founded the group that came to be known as Young Poland, and he was prominent enough as composer and teacher in Lwów, Warsaw and Katowice to have at least two books written about him. Most highly regarded for his symphonic poems and songs, he wrote his sole string quartet in 1916 during a stay in Paris. It moves confidently enough within its somewhat impersonal Romantic idiom, occasionally giving off a perfume of Debussy and Ravel, and in the finale even some moments of Bartók. This is a not dissimilar mixture to Szymanowski, in fact, but in far less concentrated form, and at nearly 33 minutes the prospect of a concert-hall breakthrough is rather more remote than it is for, say, Schulhoff’s First Quartet. On CD, however, the piece is more than welcome as a coupling to the Royal’s outstanding Szymanowski.

Szymanowski can take a degree more atmosphere in the acoustic than we get here; but the clarity of the recording certain lets the myriad details speak eloquently.