Is it a commonplace to say the early music movement made everything sound new by making it sound old? It’s not quite the same thing, but modernist poets such as Ezra Pound stripped away Victorian excesses and sentimentality by delving into the more distant past for their inspirations. The effect was a strangeness and novelty one gets from the best historically informed performances.

Chiaroscuro Quartet’s 2013 recording of Beethoven’s already otherworldly-sounding Opus 95 String Quartet for the first time has just that effect. It is also shocking. Playing gut strings with historical bows since their formation in 2005, the Quartet – comprising violinists Alina Ibragimova (a c.1780 Bellosio) and Pablo Hernán Benedí (a 1570 Amati),...