There was plenty that might have put the Takács Quartet off tearing so purposefully through the first movement of Debussy’s String Quartet: a teen-pop ringtone breaking cheerily through the silence as they were poised to begin, and a fly that seemed to want to play chicken with first violinist Edward Dusinberre’s fingers. Cellist András Fejér missed his first few notes, but it hardly mattered, and indeed, the rhythmic drive of those opening few bars insinuated itself into all that followed, regardless.

In the first movement, whenever Dusinberre began to linger, the other players were there below him to whip him back up into their tempo, stoking the music’s momentum artfully. Yes, there were moments of beautiful stillness, and in the third movement, the sequence of solo melodies sounded wistfully pastoral in a way that, suddenly and surprisingly, suggested Vaughan Williams. But the ticking of an irresistible musical motor was never far away.

Debussy pushed at boundaries with the Quartet, but his piano Preludes, published 20 years afterwards, leave them far behind. Taking over the platform, Marc-André Hamelin gave us six of them, and if he was an iota short of the ideal nonchalant poise in Debussy’s musical description of dancing fairies, he was wonderfully expansive in Fireworks, tracing long, glowing crescendos and glissandos that seared their way across the keyboard. General Lavine – Eccentric lived up to its subtitle: Hamelin brought the piece brilliantly to life, shooting out the early accented notes like bullets before pouncing on a low note as if he’d spotted that fly.

After the interval, all five joined up for Franck’s Piano Quintet, a declaration of love for one of his pupils so weighty and overblown it should probably have earned the composer a restraining order. Hamelin initially offered a small measure of contemplative coolness as counterweight, but the strings relished their heart-on-sleeve melodies – and in the finale, however loud things got, the players always seemed able to hit us with more.