Founded in 1989, the Skampa Quartet is widely regarded as one of the most important chamber ensembles to have emerged from the post-communist Czech Republic, though for UK audiences they remain primarily associated with the Wigmore Hall, where they were artists-in-residence from 1993 to 1998. Their style is idiosyncratic and distinctive: in place of the nuanced intimacy favoured by many string quartets, they adopt a high-voltage approach that is all in-your-face drama and epic sweep.

Here, they proved particularly startling in works by Martinu and Shostakovich. Martinu's Fifth Quartet, dating from 1938, both reflects the composer's anxieties about the rise of nazism and charts the fallout from a messy extramarital affair. It's a grim piece that swerves between rage and grief before tumbling into exhaustion, and the Skampa Quartet articulated its fury and pain with dogged intensity.

Martin Roscoe joined them for Shostakovich's Piano Quintet, written two years after Martinu's quartet, though inhabiting very different territory. Opening with a vast, Bach-like prelude and fugue, the work represents Shostakovich at his most reined-in and austere. Mordant humour is reserved for the central scherzo, while the quartet ends with a pastorale, its elegant undulations masking profound unease. It was beautifully done, with Roscoe's innate limpidity contrasting with the Skampa Quartet's passionate severity. That the transition to the final movement doesn't work is ultimately Shostakovich's responsibility, not theirs.

This pair of 20th-century works was prefaced by the first of Beethoven's Razumovsky Quartets, Op 59 No 1 - a piece that, in its scale and scope, redefined the parameters of chamber music. A couple of moments of suspect intonation marred the opening movement; however, the emotional fluctuations throughout the work's tremendous span were superbly negotiated and controlled.