KEY POINTS:
The Ying Quartet is a family affair, the musical equivalent of a classic "rags to riches" story - four Chinese-American siblings from a small town in Iowa who worked their way to being the quartet in residence at New York's Eastman School of Music.
The Yings are adventurous. They have played Golijov with the St Lawrence String Quartet and taken their Chinese Dim Sung programme of contemporary Chinese-American music to concerthalls and Chinese eateries.
Now their new double album (at single album price) brings together all three Tchaikovsky Quartets along with the composer's sextet Souvenir de Florence.
These are deeply committed readings, and having Tchaikovsky's Second Quartet included - with its offbeat little Scherzo and tenaciously folkish Finale - is a real bonus.
The musicians lend an attractive leanness to the celebrated Andante cantabile from the First Quartet while the Third is almost symphonic in its scope.
Here is music that hints at the Symphonie Pathetique yet to come.
The Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov, writing on Tchaikovsky, once commented that here was a composer who could hold the carpenter's pencil and the spirit of Mozart in the same embrace and that Tchaikovsky was the man who gave the fairy's kiss and a human heart to Stravinsky.
The Yings vinidicate this judgment in a spellbinding two and a quarter hours.
And, if the Russian melancholy gets a little too much as autumn turns to winter around us, the sunny textures of Souvenir de Florence will have the Italian summer pouring in through your speakers.
The Yings have also had associations with the Turtle Island Quartet, whose new disc of homages to John Coltrane is well worth searching out.
Led by David Balakrishnan on violin and baritone violin, the TIQ give us favourites like Thelonious Monk's Round Midnight and Naima, and jazz buffs will be fascinated by just how much these reworkings take Coltrane's originals on board.
All four players are deft improvisers and cellist Mark Summer is a dab hand at slap bass.
The disc comes with a recommendation from Coltrane's widow, Alice, and, for my money, you can't get much better a recommendation than that.
"h Tchaikovsky, Three String Quartets (Telarc 2CD 80685, through Elite Imports) Turtle Island Quartet, A Love Supreme (Telarc CD 80684, through Elite Imports)
