Penderecki’s works for string quartet cover the whole of his creative life, the first acknowledged one dating from 1960 and the last from 2016. This recording includes them all, as well as Der unterbrochene Gedanke (1988), the Quartet for clarinet and string trio (1993) and the String Trio from 1990 (revised the following year). The quartets themselves are of short duration, the longest being the Third, from 2008 (just over 18 minutes in this recording), and the shortest the First, at six and a half. The style moves from the post-Webernian earnestness of the First to the luxuriantly textured suggestiveness of the Third, Leaves from an Unwritten Diary, in the disconcerting fashion familiar from the composer’s orchestral output over the years.

But all these works, including the Trio, the Clarinet Quartet and Der unterbrochene Gedanke (‘The Interrupted Thought’), share a concision of utterance, and it is not, I think, easy to grasp. One almost has the sensation of Penderecki using the medium as a kind of notebook for further exploration in larger formats. None of this bothers the Meccore Quartet, who sound both entirely at home with and viscerally challenged by this music. Similarly, clarinettist Jan Jakub Bokun takes the intense brevity of the Clarinet Quartet in his stride, leaving a feeling of much more that could have been said but was not.

There is serious competition in the recording of a similar programme by the Silesian Quartet, but to prefer one to the other is, I suggest, invidious. Both should be in the library of any self-respecting Pendereckian.