Prokofiev’s quirkily attractive chamber music commands a wide timbral palette from the players but it is always delivered with poise and elegance; the same qualities that seem to seep out of the music, no matter how ‘rustic’ or ‘Soviet’ the composer was trying to be. String Quartet No.1, a commission from the US Library of Congress, is classical in tone while String Quartet No.2 is based on folk themes from the Kabardinian region in the foothills of the Caucasus mountains. By way of interlude, we are given the rarely heard Sonata for Two Violins.

What do the music of Chopin, the bowler hat and the paintings of Mark Rothko have in common? Only someone as thoughtful as Stephen Hough would pose such a riddle and provide such an interesting answer. Hough’s thoughtfulness is also brought to bear on the riddle that is the music of Frederic Chopin. Doubtless this year’s Chopin bicentenary will delight diehard romantics but it will also reinforce just how difficult it is to capture the emotional essence of his music.

The performance here by the Goldner String Quartet and Piers Lane has sinewy strength and expressive flexibility, with a rich recorded string sound counterpoised by piano playing of distinctive colour and clarity, and subtle musical charm from Lane. This is most prominent in the poignant and melodically sweet second movement, written in the style of a Dumka, a generally mournful folk ballad punctuated by sections of vitality and energy. The expressively expansive first movement has flexibility and a sound sense of structure.

The fast music in general, however, has vivid immediacy and vitality, so the whole performance captures Dvorak's distinctive contribution to music's architectural principles - the balance of reflective beauty and exuberance.

The rush of Mahler recordings in this year's sesquicentenary of his birth is welcome, bringing younger perspectives to bear on music which, in its melding of powerful expression and deep uncertainty, transcendence and neurosis, appeals so strongly to our age. Gergiev's measured tempo in the first movement of the fourth symphony, the lightest and brightest of the set, allows the mixture of pseudo-Mozartian phrasing to gleam and the ironic peasant quality of the second movement, with off-key fiddle, is well-pointed and admirably clear.

Bruno Walter, who knew Mahler but not Bruckner, thought that, like Mahler's fifth, it marked the transition to mature mastery. This performance, by the Residentie Orchestra in the Hague under Neeme Jarvi, captures its carefully crafted slabs of sound and polyphony, wrought with such obsessive care, with reverent precision and wonderful tonal balance. In the solemnly plangent second movement, Jarvi maintains strict tempo discipline, so the cross rhythms against plucked strings and the mournful oboe theme sound fateful and monumental. The finale, perhaps in imitation of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, starts with a brief snapshot of the music of the earlier movements before rushing into a vigorous fugue. Jarvi shows incisive and cogent understanding throughout.

In the famous Aria, I found Staier's speed a little slow, lending the opening a somewhat mannered, over-stylised type of expression. However, in the ensuing music, this sense of style becomes a telling point of contrast for each variation. Staier's understanding of the expressive connotations of the genres Bach adopts as he develops the theme - a toccata, a fugue, an allemande, an overture, and, famously at the end, a quodlibet (meaning a hotch-potch of tunes) - is intelligent and born of deep understanding of the baroque.