Holmboe’s First and Third Quartets (both completed in 1949) first appeared on LP in the 1950s, recorded respectively by the Erling Bloch (HMV, 5/52) and Koppel Quartets (Decca, 9/56); both can be found on YouTube but with rather thin sound. These and the Fifteenth (1977 78) coupled here were recorded again in the 1960s and ’70s by the marvellous Copenhagen Quartet, for whom Holmboe wrote many of his later quartets – immaculate readings whose availability was only fitful outside Denmark and not, I believe, transferred to CD. Only in the 1990s was a full cycle completed, also on Dacapo, from the Kontra Quartet.

It must be said that these new accounts by the Nightingale Quartet are at the very least competitive with their forebears and the finest to date sonically. In many respects, they follow similar trajectories through the works as did the Kontra, though in No 1 they are more measured in the opening Affettuoso – animato but more energised in the dancelike finale. (Neither, though, can match the white-hot Erling Bloch Quartet in 1951 for pace.) In general, however, the Nightingales bring more light and shade to this marvellous music, enhancing Holmboe’s Bartókian structure. This is particularly acute in No 3, with its three slow movements separated by two vivacious interludes, where the Nightingales have greater flow throughout.

The Kontra’s recording of No 15 was more spacious; reviewing it I noted its ‘grave, concentrated’ manner, its heart being ‘the Funèbre third movement, a searching and dramatic funeral march’. Here the Nightingales are again more measured in each movement except the lively finale, where they outpace the Kontra. Overall, this is a most promising start to an essential, richly recorded survey of what, as the late Robert Layton observed, remains a match for any other quartet cycle produced in the second half of the 20th century.