Viola player Michael Beeston is their longest-serving current member, having joined the group in 1971. Even then, the quartet had already been in existence for a dozen years under the leadership of Miles Baster, who remained in that role until 1997.

The group have gone through three subsequent leaders. Jane Murdoch and Suzanne Stanzeleit each had a spell in the first violin chair prior to Charles Mutter taking up the role. Mutter now wishes to concentrate on other aspects of his work, and the group, which is completed by violinist Philip Burren and cellist Mark Bailey, are now beginning the search for a new leader.

Mutter is unavailable for their recital at the Town House on Thursday, and Ruth Crouch, familiar to concert-goers as the assistant leader of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, will occupy the first violin chair.

“Finding a new leader is very much a matter of knowing who is available and of putting the word around that you’re looking for someone,” Michael Beeston explained. “Charles has done an excellent job for us, as did his predecessors, but now wants to do other things.

“Jane took up a position with the BBC SSO and Suzanne Stanzeleit stayed with us as long as she could, but she had married someone who lived in London,” he added. “In fact, she and her husband run Meridian Records, for whom we record, and Suzanne is now producing our CDs. We have a disc of quartets by Hans Gals due out soon. They did look at moving the company to Edinburgh, but in the end they felt that it wasn’t really going to work for them.”

The quartet have established a parallel recording relationship with an Edinburgh-based label, Inverness-born Paul Baxter’s excellent Delphian Records. Their first disc for the label is available this month, and focuses on one of the areas in which they specialise, contemporary Scottish music. Entitled “The Cold Dancer”, it features the piece of that name by Kenneth Dempster, alongside James Clapperton’s “The Great Divorce”, Judith Weir’s “String Quartet”, and William Sweeney’s “String Quartet No 3”.

The Edinburgh String Quartet will be performing at the Town House on Thursday.

“We were very interested in what Paul was doing with the Delphian label,” Beeston explained. “He seemed very go ahead, and we had been talking to him for a while about a series of recordings.

“We felt that the best one to make an initial splash would be a disc of contemporary Scottish music. I don’t think any of them have been recorded before, and I think they are pretty accessible as well as exciting.”

The quartet’s recital in Inverness was to have included “The Cold Dancer”, but it is a piece that is often done in association with an education project in local schools. In the absence of any such input this time, the ICMS committee suggested it be replaced by a less contemporary work, Frank Bridge’s “Three Idylls”.

“I believe that is the case,” Beeston said. “I would certainly have been happy to play it, but if they want something else, so be it. We’ve done the piece around 20 times now in schools, with Ken activating the kids to take part using whatever they have to hand, but we have also given a dozen or so concert performances of it as a quartet.”

In addition to Bridge’s “Idylls”, the group will play the “Quartet, Op. 16, No 1” by Hans Gals, an Austrian expatriate who spent a large part of his working life in Edinburgh after fleeing the Nazis, along with more familiar fare in Haydn’s “Quartet, Op. 54, No 2” and Dvorak’s “Quartet, Op. 51”. They are drawn from an impressively large current repertorie listed on the group’s website (www.edinburghquartet.com).

“We probably play more pieces than many quartets do and I think it keeps us fresh,” Beeston added. “We have a large repertorie available at any given time, and we always have a list of contemporary Scottish works on offer. We are always looking to add to that, and we have a project in hand for next year with the trombonist and composer John Kenny, which will involve three new commissions. We are looking forward to that.”

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