Recorded live in Sydney’s City Recital Hall last year, this disc takes the listener from the beautifully spare, intertwining lines of JS Bach’s The Art of Fugue to the lush complexity of Beethoven’s Opus 130 Quartet.

Tognetti and the ACO merely dip their toes into Bach’s contrapuntal water, offering the first four movements of the collection as a kind of musical primer for the Beethoven. The first Contrapunctus presents Bach’s subject before it’s accompanied by lively dotted rhythms in the second and inverted in the third, the ACO’s weaving voices lilting conversationally. The fourth Contrapunctus is all pizzicato, a motif from the subject’s tail brought to soft, haunting life by the voices of the instrumentalists – a quirky touch that, while effective, might scare off traditionalists.

From the clean lines of the Bach, the ACO blossoms into the warmer – if no less cerebral – textures of Beethoven’s String Quartet in B Flat, the orchestra off-leash in the first movement, singing in the lyrical moments. The Presto is taken at a gallop while the Alla Danza Tedesca: Allegro Assai has a sweet naivety. The Cavatina throbs with expression before the climax: the Große Fuge, which the ACO attacks with vigorous energy.

While there is enough ambient noise to let you know the recording is live, the strings have plenty of body and the sound quality is good. This is a robust disc that’s well worth a listen.

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