Sometimes strong performances aren’t enough to throw a work’s greatness into sharper relief. What’s needed are violent contrasts. Which is what we get with these electrifying new interpretations of two Russian string quintets that deserve to be better known. Not that Sergei Taneyev’s first of two String Quintets and Alexander Glazunov’s only String Quintet haven’t been recorded before. But to hear to the Gringolts Quartet and second cellist Christian Poltéra shift from the dense intellectual rigor of the Taneyev to the lightness and charm of the Glazunov with such conviction is something else again.

Taneyev was a Renaissance man, as interested in science and philosophy as he was in music while Glazunov was part of the famed Mitrofan Belyayev circle, who benefited from the timber magnate’s fortune and love of chamber music. While his music too can sound academic at times, his compositional fluency from a young age ensured an effortlessness that perhaps eluded Taneyev. Although as Andrew Huth writes in his booklet note, “The heavy burden of theory and reflection that Taneyev brought to the process of composing fades away when actual performance brings the music to life.” That’s certainly the case here. A stormy Allegro con spirito gives way to an even more explosive Vivace con fuoco before an extensive theme and variations – the ninth a fugue – brings to an end a work that trades in motivic metamorphosis and devilish dialectic.

The four-movement Glazunov is more conventional, more sweetly lyrical and transparent in texture. Yet the Gringolts Quartet and Poltéra embrace both works with the same spirit of scrupulous spontaneity. Another violent contrast.