Brahms supposedly destroyed 20 string quartets before publishing his first. His friend Dvořák took a slightly less ruthless approach. Although Dvořák seems to have withdrawn or disowned both of the quartets on this disc, a near-complete score of No 5 survived to be completed and performed in 1930, and a set of manuscript parts allowed No 2 to be reassembled in the 1960s. Meanwhile he recycled the Andante of No 5 as the familiar Romance, Op 11, while (rather more surprisingly) the Largo of No 2 contains the embryo of the Sixth Symphony’s lovely second movement.

Reviewing an earlier release in the Vogler Quartet’s Dvořák cycle (7/15), Rob Cowan noted the group’s ‘Beethovenian approach’ to the later quartets, and in these relatively prolix early works that same philosophy – brisk speeds, plus a muscular approach to the musical argument and a keen attention to rhythmic detail – also pays dividends. The group never wallow in the languishing Wagnerian sequences of No 2’s extended outer movements. No 5 is an altogether more purposeful work, and the Voglers generate a real sense of anticipation and release in the first movement’s introduction and Allegro.

It’s by no means austere, however, and the sweetness of leader Tim Vogler’s violin tone gives an affecting, inward quality to the two slow movements, with an easy lilt in the Andante of No 5. It’s all captured in a plain but convincing small-room acoustic; and if one briefly regrets Vogler’s decision to switch places with the slightly less ingratiating-sounding second violinist Frank Reinecke in the glorious Terzetto, Op 74, it feels churlish to split hairs. The three players move together as if by instinct in an articulate, clear-eyed reading – tender without being sentimental – of what is, by some margin, the finest music on this album.