If you wanted to make the point that 21st-century string quartet-playing is defined by a virtuosity so agile that it’s indistinguishable from the process of emotional expression, you’d be hard-pushed to find a better illustration than this new album from the Parker Quartet. Recorded at Radiostudio DRS in Zurich, the sound has a spaciousness and an unsparing clarity whose coolness is offset by the freedom it gives the performers to respond to the music, in playing of often astonishing colour, subtlety and dynamic range.

That’s most evident in the two quartets by Kurtág, in which the Parkers generate an overcast, inward emotional atmosphere across which sonorities flash and flicker. They can produce a savage metallic bark (in the Janáček-inspired finale of the Six Moments musicaux of 2005) or an almost imperceptible shadowy softness – the underlying emotional state of the Officium breve of 1989, one of those chains of Kurtág miniatures that integrates sonic DNA from Beethoven and Webern into something simultaneously intimate and monumental. During the Sostenuto episodes that frame the central meditation, the Parkers could almost be a full string orchestra, such is the ear-scouring intensity of their playing. Virtuosity and emotion are one; this is haunting, phenomenally accomplished playing, captured in forensic detail.

In between comes as refined and intelligent an account of Dvořák’s American String Quintet as you could hope to hear: panoramic in its musical and emotional scope and played with a bristling, unsentimental rhythmic alertness that in no way precludes moments of aching expressive sweetness. Booklet notes by Paul Griffiths complete an intelligent and hugely impressive release; his insights into the Kurtág are worth the price in their own right.