With a meagre legacy of classical music to call their own, Croatian composers in the first half of the last century drew on folk-music traditions even more than their peers in neighbouring Hungary. All three works belong to the turbulent climate of the 1930s, and they mirror the troubled lyricism and expanded tonal techniques of quartets by more celebrated contemporaries such as Bloch, Milhaud and Bridge. I would be pleased to hear any of them live, especially in performances as assured and wholehearted as these, and I would not feel I had been fobbed off with second-hand Bartók, even in the three-movement cyclical structure and monothematic repetitions of the Op 14 Quartet by BoŽidar Kunc.

During his lifetime, Kunc was better known as a pianist and as elder brother and accompanist to Zinka Milanov, while Fran Lhotka’s career centred on conducting and education, but their sole ventures into quartet-writing feel like idiomatic as well as personal statements, both written from the heart of the medium and most fully themselves in bittersweet elegiac mode. Quicker movements catch them falling back on folkloristic invention and a brittle, circular momentum.

Josip tolcer Slavenski is another case entirely, one of Croatian music’s most individual voices whose extraordinary Simfonija Orijenta, attempting a cantata-history of world religions, is the highlight of a recent Eloquence compilation of 1950s Decca albums from the former Yugoslavia. The concise four-movement Fourth Quartet betrays its orchestral origins as a suite of Balkan dances in the abbreviated opening ‘Kokonješće’ with its stamping, two-against-three rhythms and violent pulse. Cellist Zlatko Rucner enjoys the limelight in the edgy cantabile melody of the ensuing Largo and an angular Scherzo prepares the ground for the closing ‘Teškoto’, a Macedonian war-dance recognisably from the same world as early Xenakis in its hard, unbroken surfaces and resistance to tonal development. Spaciously engineered and infused with native sympathy, the Sebastian Quartet’s performances leave nothing to be desired except for a more helpful booklet essay.