The Nightingale Quartet’s first volume (3/21) opened with Holmboe’s first published quartet, Op 46, and this second concludes with his final thoughts on the medium, the Quartetto sereno. Started in late spring 1996, two months before his death, Holmboe only managed to sketch two movements, a tranquil, opening Adagio surrounding a more animated Con fuoco central section, succeeded by an initially pizzicato scherzo marked Allegro, which concludes Adagio. Holmboe’s former student and great friend Per Nørgård fashioned the sketches into the present diptych in 1997 and I can provide no better description of the result than his: ‘a short, beautiful and moving epilogue’.

In an increasingly mad world, there is much to be said for the sanity of Holmboe’s music. The principal works here are the Second and Fourteenth Quartets. No 2 (1949) is in some respects the bright heart of that first group of quartets, a relaxation (of sorts – there is plenty of drama) that explored further the Bartókian landscapes of the First, not least in the arch-like structure of its five movements. By contrast, the delightful and gently quixotic Fourteenth (1975), one of the most immediate in appeal of his later quartets, is cast in six short movements: slow-fast-fast-slow-fast-fast.

The Kontra Quartet’s pioneering 1990s recordings remain the only available competition for all three quartets, and fine as they remain, the Nightingale’s are finer still. As with Vol 1, Dacapo’s warmer sound captures the Nightingale’s fuller, richer tone wonderfully; the Kontras sound hard and thin by comparison. The Nightingales are less clinical than their predecessors, too, paying dividends in their tauter account of No 2, with the opening Allegro fluente truly fluente. The Nightingales take a more expansive route through the Fourteenth (by almost three minutes) and are also markedly slower in the Sereno’s opening Adagio. These, then, are new, original interpretations of one of Denmark’s hidden gems, on which they are casting much-deserved light.