For their third CD for harmonia mundi they perform three French String Quartets, all by composers who wrote little chamber music. Debussy and Ravel composed their only string quartet at the start of their careers, whereas Dutilleux wrote Ainsi la nuit shortly before his 60th birthday. Debussy s quartet, dedicated to the Ysa e Quartet, is his only work to possess an opus number. Written in 1892-3, it comprises the standard four movements and adopts sonata form in the two outer movements. The String Quartet of Ravel was composed in 1902-03 and premiered by the Heyman Quartet on 5 March 1904. It possesses undeniable signs of kinship with the Debussy work: it conforms to the cyclic principle, and begins and ends with a sonata form movement; its scherzo is similarly characterised by crackling pizzicatos which stylise the sound of the guitar and give the movement a Spanish colour; as with Debussy, the strings play with mutes in the first and last sections of the slow movement.