Cardiff was an early champion of the music of Peter Maxwell Davies. In the year the former enfant terrible turns 75, the Carducci Quartet's early birthday tribute was a fitting one.

While Davies's Naxos Quartets are primarily associated with the Maggini Quartet, the authority with which the Carducci played the Fifth Quartet was hugely impressive. The score is subtitled Lighthouses of Orkney and Shetland, and conveys the broad sweep of a lighthouse beam, as well as its sporadic, individual flashes. Its mix of atmospheric and evocative sounds with an abstract precision - one that parallels the navigator's relationship with chronometry - make compelling listening. The Carducci negotiated all this with remarkable assurance, creating a magical, misty haze that signalled both the romance and the implicit danger; they also whipped up periodic, menacing storms.

The contrast with Bartók's Fourth Quartet could not have been more starkly realised: the Carducci found such a raw and earthy tone, one could have sworn they had changed instruments. But the work's driving energy was sustained with tightly disciplined playing; the sweeping arc of its structural form clearly delineated.

After two such strongly characterised pieces, Schubert's D minor Quartet, Death and the Maiden, D810, might have been an anticlimax. But the Carducci attacked the opening allegro with a passion and impetuosity that were a match for the 27-year-old composer. They also brought to the slow movement a transcendent beauty, and colours that suggested a rare maturity - confirming this quartet's gift for unselfconscious and totally engaging communication.