On the concert platform, there is something businesslike about the Alban Berg Quartet. They waste no time between works with unnecessary exits and entrances, nor do they ostentatiously seek applause after performances. The trouble is, their playing is too often also efficient and lacking in personality; their performances may be memorable but their technical assurance can easily slip into routine.

It's hard not to make an impact with Schubert's C minor Quartettsatz and the C major String Quintet but the ABQ managed it. The quartet movement was just glib, going through the motions with every note perfectly in place but conveying no sense of the piece as abstract drama, let alone as some of the most incipiently tragic music in Schubert's output. The quintet was even more disappointing, less an interpretation of one of the pinnacles of Western music than a faithful rendering of the musical text, with little heed for what lay behind it.

Heinrich Schiff joined the group as second cellist, and provided the humanity and musicality lacking elsewhere. The expressive power with which he invested the pizzicatos in the slow movement was extraordinary, and the way in which he and the viola player Isabel Charisius watched and reacted to their colleagues contrasted sharply with the way in which the leader kept his head down and drove the music relentlessly forward.

Between the two Schubert works the ABQ played Giya Kancheli's Night Prayers, one of the first pieces he completed after he leaving his native Georgia for western Europe in 1991. A single movement lasting around 20 minutes, it presents the usual Kancheli mixture - shards of melody that might be the remains of a hymn or a dance, always promising but never delivering a full blown statement. A pre-recorded tape adds a growling backdrop at one point, and provides the epiphany in the final bars when a soprano voice spirals above the quartet; kitsch really.