Haydn’s Op 9 quartets are commonly seen as his first ‘mature’ set, written during the period when he emerged as an indisputably great composer. They have an amplitude, a seriousness of intent and an increasing mastery of rhetoric and thematic development that are a world away from his earlier works. They demonstrate the dazzling inventiveness and sense of symphonic structure which characterize Haydn’s greatest works.

The London Haydn Quartet perform on gut strings with classical bows, and have returned to eighteenth-century editions of the quartets, allowing them the greatest variety of interpretative possibilities.