That Glazunov’s chamber music is often dismissed as old-fashioned isn’t necessarily a bad thing and although, as their teacher, Prokofiev and Stravinsky hectored him, there is still an elder-statesman feel to this repertoire that brings it a welcome gravitas in a period of great change.

The Third String Quartet is more a set of dances – Glazunov’s obsession with folk music pervades all the pieces on this disc – that sound almost English in their pastoral personality, despite its nickname of Slavonic (an appealing quality that bleeds into the disc’s central Idyll for horn, played with great gentleness and calm by Christoph Ess, principal horn of the Bamberg orchestra). Its lilting character is reflected in its loose structure, the Zemlinskys appreciating this by taking a more playful tack than they do with its sterner sister, No 4.

Fundamentally, though, there is an undeniable lack of virtuosity in these pieces that can leave them a bit out in the artistic cold. The Zemlinskys play them perfectly for what they are, welcoming their harmonic inevitabilities as positive rather than a let-down when the music has built up to a hiatus and taken – as it often does – a frustratingly anodyne turn. They add a dimension that could easily be lacking in other hands, although this leads to the unfortunate by-product that hearing them played with such poise and accomplished ensemble tends to sound a bit incongruous. Nevertheless, they quite rightly treat it with a lightness best saved for Mendelssohn or Pleyel, rather than the lugubrious, transitive Russian music it is not.