Elégie, a transcription of Katerina Izmailova’s Act 1 aria from Lady Macbeth (not Act 3, as per the booklet), is expressive and flowing, if without the degree of heartache that the original setting might suggest. When Shostakovich quotes from the same opera in the fourth movement of String Quartet No 8, the Debussys’ cellist registers the poignancy of the moment, helped by the inwardness of the first violin’s preceding rendition of the revolutionary song ‘Tormented by Harsh Captivity’.

Those are in many ways the highlights of the new disc. For me, at least, the Eleventh Quartet is a little bland: beautifully textured and blended, to be sure, but lacking compelling identification with the theatre of the bizarre that animates its seven snapshot movements. The violent second movement of the Eighth Quartet lacks nothing in communicative vigour, but by the highest standards it borders on being technically scrappy, while the nuancing of the following valse macabre feels a mite self-conscious. I applaud the control brought to the most demanding passages of Quartet No 5 – of which there are many – and there is a touching purity to the finale. What I miss is a sense of outrage, whose object need not be defined (there is certainly a personal agenda here alongside other more arguable existential ones) but which surely dictates something more obsessive and challenging than we are offered here.