Bloch wrote five mature string quartets, spanning 40 years of his life, while the impressionistic shorter pieces included here date from between 1924 and 1950. They are highly characteristic, intense in feeling, restless, harmonically rich and well worth getting to know. The G major Quartet, however, is an enjoyably accomplished student work written when Bloch was only 15 years old. It is in the classical tradition and has a fine slow movement and an attractively light-hearted finale.

Of the shorter, evocative miniatures, the opening Prelude (Recueillement) is unexpectedly brief (barely four minutes) but poignant, a slow fugal farewell to the composer’s directorship of the Cleveland Institute of Music. The three Landscapes are even shorter and similarly concentrated, the first two lyrical, the last, shortest of all, bringing pounding percussive effects. In the warmly passionate Prayer (arranged by the quartet’s cellist, Julian Kilchenmann) is the Bloch we recognise from Schelomo. The Two Pieces, written much later in 1938 but based on earlier material, are contrasted, the first gracious and relatively calm, the second all but a scherzando. Night is a hauntingly characteristic nocturnal, full of melancholy. The two sketches In the Mountains are quite contrasted. The first is a yearning impression of dusk falling over the Haute Savoie, where the composer regularly visited in his youth, and the second is a lively rustic dance, altogether more positive and life-assertive.

The performances by the Galatea Quartet, very well recorded, are highly sympathic and beautifully played, catching the composer’s deeply felt response to his surroundings.