This marks the start of a cycle of Wilhelm Stenhammar's string quartets from the ensemble, founded in 2002, that adopted his name. Stenhammar wrote seven quartets in all, of which the Third and Fourth are given here. The Third (1900), marking his emergence from a crisis of self-doubt after the failure of his opera Tirfing, takes Beethovenian models and motifs as points of departure for a titanic struggle to find his individual voice. The opening movements of the Fourth (1909) suggest the organic quality of Sibelius, to whom the work is dedicated, though it culminates in an extraordinary series of variations, one of the finest ever composed, on a tonally ambivalent Swedish folk song. The performances, bristling with tension and lyrical beauty, are exceptional.