The Doric Quartet, operating out of London, challenge all our assumptions about Papa Joe’s string quartets, telling us, “We know Haydn can sound like this, but have you ever considered it could sound like that too?” Haydn’s Opus 76 was the last extended set of string quartets he wrote, contemporary in his output with The Creation and the London Symphonies, music that would distil an entire lifetime of creative discovery into structures where the genuinely sublime felt at ease with the authentically bawdy.

If you prefer your Haydn performed within carefully delineated ‘Classical’ limits, then the Doric’s re-examination of the DNA of these late-period scores might represent too much of a walk on the wild side. The quartet splash around wideband dynamics and proto-expressionistic timbres with such obvious abandon we are reminded that Haydn would not only provide a seedbed of ideas for Mozart and Beethoven, but that stirrings of Schubert, Bruckner and Second Viennese School thinking, too, are to be found within the thrusting loins of this music.

Op. 76, No 1 gives notice of how every detail will be up for renegotiation. Notice cellist John Myerscough’s free-spirited phrasing during the first movement’s opening theme; but also how the remaining instruments provide grounded support for his capricious invention. General extravagance of gesture and setting contrast noticeably with the paired-back sustained fragility of the slow movement, where Haydn qualifies his Adagio marking with ‘sostenuto’ and the Dorics more than deliver; and again during those ultra-whispered, misterioso shifts of tonal centre during the Finale.

The opening of Op. 76, No 2 (Fifths) threatens to break the fourth wall of quartet-lore entirely as those naked, bagpipe perfect fifths could only sound more rabidly Scottish if they held a referendum over whether to declare independence from the rest of the piece. Too much? Undoubtedly some listeners will find this degree of extrapolation overly characterised, stagey even.

But looking at matters the other way, the Doric’s traversal through the opening movement of Op. 76, No 4 (Sunrise) is not merely pretty sketching. You can actually feel the music leaning to seek out the light as the group squeeze the utmost out of Haydn’s cloudbursts of contrasting material. No 3 (Emperor), with its famous second movement variations, feels cannily objectified in contrast, the variations taken as if in a single musical breath – a cycle that touches all bases.