“If God … wished to listen to music himself, He would choose the works of Boccherini,” wrote the French violin virtuoso Jean-Baptiste Cartier in 1798. It’s impossible to know whether the members of the New Music String Quartet were familiar with Cartier’s quip when they produced this magnificent 1955 recording, but their disposition towards the composer appears to have been no less fervent. They claw into the album’s four Boccherini quartets with near-religious zeal, first ecstatically, in the sturm-and-drang B minor quartet that begins the album, then pleadingly, in the more placid pair of E-flat Major quartets that conclude it. If a higher power was truly at work, it seems to have gotten its fill – the Quartet disbanded the following year.