Like the Miami Quartet on their identically coupled Conifer Classics anthology (7/99 – sadly nla), the Navarra kick off with the Third Quartet. Completed in 1995, it’s a meaty piece of striking emotional candour incorporating elements of folk music, hymnody and birdsong. There are four movements, the last of which subtly amalgamates and ponders material from the preceding three. The Miami Quartet’s world premiere recording remains a wonderfully mellifluous affair but sounds a mite too comfortable next to the biting intensity, searing concentration and dramatic flair of this newcomer. It’s a similar story in the altogether more acerbic and confrontational First Quartet (written in 1977 and revised 20 years later), though here it’s the Navarras’ gorgeously songful tone in the reflective finale (“Melodia”) that lingers longest in the memory. Artistic honours are about even in the Second Quartet of 1984 (Summer Songs), perhaps the most sheerly lyrical of the three (its centrepiece, “Birds”, aptly described by one commentator as an “ornithological carnival”). I should, however, mention an outstandingly compelling third option (the piece’s first recording, in fact, and currently unavailable) from the Duke Quartet on Collins Classics (7/96), which arguably plumbs even greater depths in the imploring concluding “Elegia” than does either of its rivals.

Challenge Classics’ irrepressibly vivid sound fairly leaps out of the speakers, though the actual balance is a tad close. Perhaps this same team will now turn their attention to Vasks’s Fourth and Fifth Quartets (from 1999 and 2004 respectively)?