The Fifth Quartet is not yet 20 years old, but like the Third from 1946, it looks back to Beethoven, and says: “Let’s see if we can match that!” The long, slow closing movement of the Fifth also hints at the valedictory mood of the Britten Third, along with some of the quieter ecstasy contained in The Midsummer Marriage. Tippett’s works rarely lack the jazzy reminder that life is worth living, whatever comes, and the Fifth invokes nightingales as well as Beethoven to make that point once more. Last year, I was writing on Tippett under all kinds of dark and cold stresses and strains, but the music saw me through with unshakeable optimism. It does the same trick here, and the Fifth is a neglected, quirky masterwork.

The Third is slightly longer, at 31 minutes, five movements in a Bartókian arch. The finale starts out decorous, but winds up magnificent. There, as in all the movements, the Tippett Quartet balances detail, tight rhythm, and emotional response without losing tonal focus or the long structural view. The central Allegro molto may give you the best idea of the character of the performances: accurate, tough, sensitive.

Tippett wrote high string lines that are sometimes wilfully hard to play right, and sometimes they sound that way. The Tippetts don’t short-change us by playing safe, and while we need far more performances from other groups, on Naxos we do get a real sense of the transcendent. Try the Lento of the Third Quartet to hear high-lying passions that are not uncontained, but which feel true to life. Life enhancing, in fact. Just buy it.

Tippett in 1946 was entering his most visionary phase but the Tippett Quartet’s approach to the Third Quartet emphasises weight and earthiness rather than the transcendent lightness of spirit that would emerge most fully in The Midsummer Marriage. There’s a sense of the piece’s formidable technical challenges being bravely confronted rather than triumphantly overcome; but this is certainly a performance full of drama and excitement, a feature enhanced by the closely focused recording.

Tippett was 85 when he began work on his Fifth Quartet in 1990, and the best music comes in a first movement whose sustained spontaneity is admirably conveyed in this performance. The Tippett Quartet can also be commended for not rushing or over-dramatising the more diffuse and repetitive second movement, even though it now seems a pity that the composer wasn’t persuaded to prune some of its more extended duplications. The Tippett Quartet’s well integrated sound is a pleasure throughout, and together with their first Tippett disc (8.570496) this completes a rewarding survey of a contribution to the quartet repertory which is in danger—undeservedly—of falling out of fashion.