The penultimate volume in the Danish String Quartet’s Prism series linking Bach fugues with string quartets by Beethoven and later composers boasts revelatory playing, finessed and fierce, that penetrates to the bone, fibre and heart of the protean Lutheran’s successors’ music. Where previous instalments highlighted 20th-century quartets by Bartók, Schnittke and Shostakovich, here the focus shifts backwards in time to Mendelssohn.

Danish String Quartet

The jumping-off point is the G Minor “Little Fugue” (BWV861) from the first book of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier in an arrangement by Emanuel Aloys Förster, whom Beethoven admired enough to recommend students to him. In truth, it’s a workmanlike arrangement, but one whose subdued, unsettled temperament is realised by the Danish foursome with a duly adroit and spryly voiced exactitude that prepares the ground for what is to follow.

That work’s leading four-note motif, transposed down a seventh for the cello, provides the kernel (intentional or not) for the first movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet No 15 in A Minor (Op.132). The catalogue is well stocked with recommendable recordings of this venerable late work, to which...