Perhaps it’s no surprise to find Stravinsky criticising Prokofiev’s Soviet output as ‘provincial’, but Prokofiev could be equally nonplussed by the lack of aesthetic novelty in Shostakovich. Volume 6 of the Sorrel Quartet’s series gives us two of his outwardly formulaic works framing one of his most audacious, the Twelfth Quartet. It’s a rather peculiar programme, not that this need bother anyone collecting this particular intégrale.

The playing is as idiomatic as you might expect from an ensemble once coached by Rostislav Dubinsky, founder member and first leader of the Borodin Quartet. True, the almost casual opening of the First Quartet is not ideally euphonious and, in the first movement of the Twelfth, there’s a momentary lapse of concentration from the viola, whose expressive swoops elsewhere may not be to all tastes. What matters more is the palpable, very human sense of engagement, something you don’t always get from glitzier groups.

Given that the best recordings of the Piano Quintet are 20 years old and either tucked away or buried altogether, the present account is not unwelcome, though it is relatively small-scale. You’d be lucky to find Sviatoslav Richter with the 1980s Borodin line-up (Melodiya, 11/85R – nla) but Vladimir Ashkenazy and the Fitzwilliam Quartet inhabit a twofer entitled ‘Russian Cello Sonatas’! For something more individual there’s always the previous Chandos version involving Dubinsky’s own Borodin Trio: passionate indeed, if perhaps no longer chamber music. On the present issue it’s the subtle intimacy of the final pay-off one remembers, the warmth of the Maltings acoustic masking any thinness of tone.