On track: A youthful take on an old master

You won't want to miss the Jerusalem Quartet's Shostakovich album if, like me, you were enthralled by their Town Hall concert last April. With good reason, as the group's stunning interpretation of the composer's Fourth Quartet, the undisputed highlight on stage a year ago, is the centrepiece of the new CD.

This release is perfectly timed for Shostakovich's centenary and the choice of the first, fourth and ninth quartets is a winner. Be prepared to be wooed by the bittersweet prettiness of the first quartet and shaken up, even harrowed, by the moodswings of the ninth.

The fourth is an emotional halfway house, with its earthy drones and subtle Jewish traceries.

These musicians' strength is their youth. They teasingly wend in and out of the first's chromatic shifts and stride through the fourth's finale like single-minded Soviet-style athletes.

And yet the shellshocked beauties and gallows pizzicato of the ninth's two Adagio movements are not taken lightly.

These are highly persuasive performances, beautifully illuminated in a most responsive recording from Harmonia Mundi.

Talking moodswings, the Brodsky Quartet deal out 14 on their new CD with just that title.

We are told that Moodswings is an exploration of the voice/quartet combination that has attracted composers from Schoenberg to the Beatles.

In doing so, the Brodskys get alongside old friends such as Elvis Costello and Bjork, as well as airing some of the numbers written by talented youngsters during the quartet's education programme.

The students wax a little precocious and precious at times, and hats off to singer Jacqui Dankworth who stops The Abyss being swallowed up by its own significance. A few tracks later, the versatile singer nimbly tiptoes around the patchworked nursery rhymes of Daniel Monk's Song.

Among the Brodsky's more famous partners, Sting is his usual bland self, Costello underlines the ironies of Randy Newman with a carpenter's pencil, and Bjork darts like an Icelandic elf around lashings of Ravel.

How nice to be reminded, though, that veteran composer and piano man Richard Rodney Bennett is still a kabaretmeister. "I never went away," he choruses.

We can but beam our approval.

* Jerusalem Quartet play Shostakovich (Harmonia Mundi HMC 901865, through Ode Records)

Brodsky Quartet, Moodswings (Brodsky Records BRD 3501, through Ode Records)