As much as it's marking next year's centenary, the Wigmore's Benjamin Britten series Before Life and After is designed most of all as a celebration of the composer's relationship with the hall itself. Between 1934 and 1986 no fewer than 24 of his works received premieres of one kind or another there; the majority were world premieres. Among them were the first two of Britten's three numbered string quartets; the Griller Quartet introduced Britten's First Quartet to Britain at the Wigmore in 1943, where two years later the Second was premiered by the Zorian.

The Takács surveyed all three in their recital, which combined supreme technical brilliance with their usual, unfussy approach. Their performances revealed how astonishingly assured Britten's quartet writing always was, from the pristine interweaving lines of the opening bars of the First Quartet, to the Bartókian aggression of parts of the Third. None of the works is particularly easy to unwrap; there's unease even under the glistening surfaces of the First, while the Purcell-inspired finale of the Second seems to me a very strange movement indeed: it steadfastly refuses to settle for the affirmative ending its variation form seems to require.

The Third is famously permeated with echoes of the opera Death in Venice, and with Britten's own memories of the city, but I'm not sure that prefacing it with Peter Eyre reading extracts from Thomas Mann's novella enhanced this performance. Nothing needs to be added to the effect of the Quartet's final passacaglia, which somehow manages to be both consoling and inexpressibly sad at the same time. The Takács presented it without adornment; one of their greatest qualities as a group is their shared instinct of when to leave music to speak for itself.

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