Late in life, Haydn reportedly expressed the wish that his canon of string quartets should be considered to have begun not with his very earliest works in the form, from the late 1750s, but with Op 9 (c1769). In the decade since Op 1, Haydn had been engaged in writing a hefty body of baryton works for his princely employer and this consideration of solo-string sonority found its release in an outpouring of quartets from the late 1760s, of which Op 9 was the first fruit.

These days, however, the Op 20 set (pubd 1772) is more readily considered the quartet’s coming of age, with its synthesis of motivic writing and counterpoint, resulting in the full emancipation of all four instruments – ‘a conversation between four intelligent people’, as Goethe so memorably put it. The six quartets of Op 17 (1770-71) are stuck in between Opp 9 and 20 as a sort of poor relation, and often seem to languish in the shadow of the later set – even Richard Wigmore in his wonderful Faber Pocket Guide (2009) acknowledges some perceived weaknesses and describes the theme-and-variations opening movement of No 3 as ‘vapid’. Neverthless, there is plenty to tweak the ear in these works, not least in the minuets, which Haydn characteristically reserved for his most audacious sonic experiments. The pure, sweet tone of Haydn’s leader, Luigi Tomasini, is the guiding spirit, resulting in long-breathed, aria-like slow movements – indeed, a quasi-operatic scena complete with recitative passages in the Adagio of No 5.

Stefan Arzberger, now restored to the Leipzig Quartet’s leader’s chair, channels Tomasini in performances that don’t undersell these three works, with a nod to their genial wit, if perhaps a tendency to matter-of-factness where something more probing might be desired. The sound is near-ideal, with the microphone training its focus marginally towards Arzberger, who, after all, has the lion’s share of the melodic heavy lifting. The resonance of the white-walled concert hall of Marienmünster Abbey in rural North Rhine-Westphalia provides a gentle glow to the sound and picks up only the bare minimum of breath and action noise.