Shostakovich's Eighth Quartet has always been the most popular of the series, although perceptions of its extra-musical intentions have altered radically. The piece was composed shortly after he visited the ruins of Dresden in 1960, and it was publicly dedicated to "the victims of war and fascism". However, more recently, Shostakovich's confidant Isaac Glikman revealed that its copious self-quotation and use of the musical motif based on the composer's own initials also hinted at some kind of private self-requiem.

The intensity and immediacy of its material and tight formal construction make this one of Shostakovich's most potent works. The Skampa Quartet brought their customary assurance to every bar of the piece, with their individual contributions welded into a single, unified statement.

Arguably, however, a greater level of emotion was needed to give the piece its ultimate authority as a document of despair. The Quartet's opening work, too, the first of Mozart's late Prussian quartets, could have done with more character, and revealed a technical weakness in some insecure intonation.

The evening's finest performance came with Smetana's Second Quartet. This is an extraordinary piece, composed in 1883 as the Czech nationalist was steadily succumbing, both physically as well as mentally, to the syphilis that was to kill him a year later. This deeply idiosyncratic music arguably bears the signs not just of suffering but of growing incapacity. But its vehemence and sense of rage at the dying of the light were terrifyingly conveyed in the Skampa's no-holds-barred account.