I hadn’t thought that Brahms’s string sextets offered much opportunity for musical risk-taking but the Belcea Quartet and friends have convinced me otherwise. To see what I mean, start at 6'17" in the Andante ma moderato of the First Sextet (two-thirds of the way or so through the movement), where the musicians pare their collective tone down to a mere wisp, as if each were bowing with a single, glowing hair. Playing with little or no vibrato, the result is ethereally delicate – I was put in mind of a heavenly hurdy-gurdy – that renders Brahms’s scoring as a stroke of colouristic genius. Then, in the Scherzo that follows, the ensemble dig in with a vengeance to create a rough, rustic sound that’s not always pretty. This kind of stark contrast can be found throughout both works and gave me an entirely new perspective on pieces I thought I knew quite well.

Listen, say, at 7'25" in the development section of the Second Sextet’s opening movement where, again, the Belcea imbue a quiet passage with a sense of otherworldly fragility, and note how this helps to set up a memorably dramatic moment in the transition to the recapitulation, which is given here with a tonal intensity the likes of which I’ve never encountered before in this music. There’s drama, too, in the glorious Poco adagio, whose outer sections are played with a hushed and patient sense of rapturous melancholy, while the central Più animato, with its nervous dotted rhythms and obsessive imitative counterpoint, is given with exceptional ferocity.

These are such lovable works, full of lyricism and charm, and these performances don’t skimp on that. I was taken in immediately in Op 18 by the way cellist Antoine Lederlin phrases the exquisite opening melody, and he’s even more persuasive in the finale – his portamento had me positively swooning.

I do have a few cavils. For instance, I wish the tempo for the Poco allegro finale of Op 36 was a little more relaxed, as it sounds like a plain old allegro to me. But while I can think of numerous recordings of these works that offer affection and graciousness in abundance, I can’t think of another that’s as ear-opening as it is warm-hearted.