There's long been something heartening about the Lindsays, four middle-aged blokes in shirt sleeves who, immune to record-company make-overs, have remained the godfathers of the British string quartet scene while pretenders come and go. But it's time to bid them a fond farewell: after 40 years together, they have announced they will be calling it a day at the end of next season.

That leaves them with just over a year for their lap of honour, which will include cycles of Tippett, Beethoven - and Haydn, the sine qua non of the quartet repertoire. Friday night's concert of the first four Opus 20 quartets launched the first of three Haydn weekenders which the Lindsays will be giving here this year, working through all the mature quartets in numerical order. This is not just characteristic thoroughness; as the quartet's leader Peter Cropper explained, they wanted to remind us that for every famous quartet there are one or two opus numbers either side that are rarely heard yet are almost as deserving.

Only the last of these four is played very often, and so it wasn't surprising that it sounded the most polished. Yet the sheen the four players projected throughout wasn't all to do with the actual sound. In fact, unison passages occasionally exposed some slightly wayward tuning, and some of the more frenzied moments of the programme - the syncopations of the last movement of the first Op. 20 quartet, the eruption after the hushed weavings at the beginning of the finale to the second - found Cropper trying to saw through his violin. Rather, it was a different kind of refinement, the result of years of thinking together and building a considered yet unfixed interpretation.

Op. 20 No. 1, relatively unfamiliar, came over especially well, with the minuet theme coming round umpteen times but always feeling slightly different, and the balance between instruments was always absolutely right. If the Lindsays' mission is to leave us humming some new Haydn before they go, that first quartet got them off to a good start.