There have already been various projects centred on the concept of social and cultural breakdown throughout the extended pandemic of 2020 21, the Berlin-based Kuss Quartet adding the issue of renewed European conflict into this equation with their latest release.

Opening with its plangent take on the introduction from Haydn’s Eastertide meditations, the first part continues with Francesco Ciurlo’s intensive interplay between harmonic stasis and rhythmic dynamism – ‘until your eyeballs explode’ alluding to concentration as a process fraught with its destruction. Next the searching plaintiveness of Haydn’s Fifth Last Word, then the wistfulness surrounded by aggression of the Scherzo from Schubert’s Death and the Maiden Quartet.

Heading towards decisiveness then back towards indecision, the first movement of Bartók’s Sixth Quartet contrasts with the unalloyed emotional numbness in that from Shostakovich’s Eighth Quartet – segueing into Birke Bertelsmeier interpreting ‘Crisis’ in terms of a volatile superimposition of distorted memories. Reich conjures the destruction of 9/11 in inscrutable terms, before Komitas evokes the actuality of genocide with a fatalistic pathos.

The soulful strains of the third movement from Mendelssohn’s Sixth Quartet usher in a third part duly countered with the elation, ultimately collapsing into resignation, of the finale from Smetana’s First Quartet. Including the quartet by Janáček complete might have unbalanced the sequence but this performance sustains unremitting focus up to the expressive anguish of its finale, from where Oscar Escudero’s fractured algorithmic simulation of musical Classicism makes for a darkly humorous portent of what might well become normality within a ‘Post’-pandemic dystopia.