The Arcanto Quartet are what you might call a state-of-the- art, 21st-century string quartet. It’s members (Antje Weithaas, Tabea Zimmermann, Daniel Sepec and Jean-Guihen Queyras) are all soloists in their own right, and they bring their full range of device and nuance to bear on three quartets by French composers. The quartet lay out their stall pretty clearly in Debussy, where the playing ranges from passages that have an almost orchestral richness and spread of sonority, to others where the sound has a viol-like absence of vibrato, and others again where there’s an aggression and bite that really only came into music-making through the 1950s avant-garde. They apply the same rich panoply of resources to Ravel, and, to predictably even greater effect, in the nocturnal timbral responses of Dutilleux’s

Ainsi la nuit

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