Haydn began his six Op. 76 Quartets shortly after his return to Vienna in August 1795, following the second of his two triumphant visits to England; they were published by Artaria in Vienna in two groups of three and dedicated to Count Joseph Erdody. When Dr Charles Burney heard them for the first time in 1799, he wrote to Haydn saying that he had ''never received more pleasure from instrumental music'', adding ''they are full of invention, fire, good taste, and new effects, and seem the product, not of a sublime genius who has written so much and so well already, but of one of highly cultivated talents, who had expended none of his fire before''. And over a century later W. W. Cobbett declared ''the six works comprising Op. 76 are of outstanding beauty, and if Haydn had never written another quartet they would have served to immortalized his name''.
Number 4 has been nicknamed Sunrise because of the way in which the first violin's melody at the very beginning unfolds so magically, but the quartet is equally remarkable for its hymn-like Adagio, which is later treated with ornamental flourishes on first violin and cello. Tovey thought that the set tailed off towards the end, and wrote ''the graceful ingenuities [of No. 6] roll away like the process of peeling an onion'': an extraordinary assessment of a work of such originality and beauty, which boasts a variation-form first movement that incorporates a full-blown fugue, a slow movement in B major entitled ''Fantasia'' and with a harmonic scheme so bold as to be almost Schubertian, and a Scherzo (masquerading as a Minuet) whose trio is entirely based on the descending and ascending scale of E flat.
The performances by the Orlando Quartet, whose earlier recording of Haydn's two Op. 54 Quartets (Philips 9500 996, 10/81) was highly praised by RF, are of quite exceptional quality, distinguished by a marvellous rhythmic sense, an unusually wide dynamic range, and flawless ensemble and intonation. Their eloquence in the slow movements, which are among Haydn's finest, is matched by an exhilarating vitality in the quick ones. In short, this is magnificent playing and it is supported by an uncannily lifelike recording: an outstanding issue.'