The Calidore Quartet prime their tonal canvas in warm shades: nothing so bland as magnolia, but more opulent than the Danish String Quartet (ECM) or the Brodskys (Chandos, 3/20) among recent sets of the late quartets. An unfashionable degree of legato gives full value to the notes in the opening movements of Op 130 and Op 131, which are marked by surges of tide rather than punctuation of attack. The effect is to privilege continuity over contrast, communion over difference. In music notorious for the challenges it poses to successive generations of first-time listeners, the Calidores issue a friendly invitation, made the more enticing by a level of technical finesse up there with the best versions old and new, and studio engineering that places the listener at a respectable (but not too safe) distance.

One advantage of this approach is to underline the nature of the three Galitzin quartets (Opp 127, 130 and 132), plus Op 131, as chapters in a novel, like a late quartet on an even grander scale than Beethoven initially conceived. The stepwise motion of the Grosse Fuge (played here as the climax to Op 130, with the replacement finale as an appendix) loses some of its forbidding angularity when echoes of it present themselves not just in the obvious places, such as the opening movements of Opp 130 132, but even on the holy ground of the ‘Heiliger Dankgesang’. Here, at a very spacious tempo, the Calidore impart to its hymn theme a radiance that creates its own acoustic, and later on a pure tone all the more illuminating for its sparing use.

Op 127 promises much in the heroic maestoso of its opening movement but loses its way slightly – or loses me, at any rate – in the Adagio at too stately a pulse. Where the Calidore excel is Op 135, which if only for its brevity tends to attract less attention in sets of the late quartets. Questions and answers are strongly differentiated, not just in the ‘Muss es sein’ finale but throughout, and with an immediacy that transcends the studio context. It is not their way to let the Scherzo’s off-beat interventions become strident but they make the maddening Escher-staircase passage (from 1'38") every bit as disturbing as it should be.

The Takács (Decca, 5/05) and the Belcea (Alpha, 1/13, 8/13, 1/20) present the Cavatina as an other-worldly experience from the outset. In a slightly narrower dynamic envelope, the Calidore draw the listener in with a stronger emphasis on the melodic line, bearing an unusual resemblance in this regard to the quartet from Fidelio. The singing qualities of the finale, both in its folky and its most possessed episodes, actually sharpen rather than soften its profile as an instrumental drama, only abstract in the sense that it replaces words with strings and bows. Cantabile is the word that recurred throughout my listening notes, and for late Beethoven to sing may be counted recommendation enough.