The arrival two years ago of Welshman Paul Watkins as cellist of the Emerson Quartet has represented a new lease of life for the American ensemble. The energy and drive of this recital confirmed as much.

Their programme was massive by any standards, with three works each a cornerstone of the repertoire. Beginning with the very last of Beethoven’s quartets, Op 135, was of itself a challenge. Yet its apparent innocence and perplexity was carefully balanced so as to draw the listener into the composer’s intimate world, the Lento assai carrying a prayer-like quality.

The contrast with Bartók’s Fourth Quartet was particularly striking, with the second and fourth movements of the five-movement arc-form realising a controlled but nevertheless frenetic fever. In the slow central movement, high point of the emotional arc, Watkins’s cello solo, surrounded by the atmospheric sounds of a Hungarian night, offered the most expressive and eloquently nuanced playing.

The Emersons are notable for having founding-members Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer alternate first and second violin roles, although the downside of that equality can be that, sometimes, neither shows the defining authority the writing demands. Here, it was impossible not to observe that Watkins was also effectively leading from the cello, blending with Lawrence Dutton’s viola and bringing an added interpretative coherence.

That was again apparent in Schubert’s last quartet, D887 in G major. After the drama of the opening with its major/minor ambiguity, the dust settled and the ultimate success of this performance was in making the work – notoriously or divinely long, depending on your Schubert perspective – flow seamlessly, capturing both the music’s serenity and its intensity.