One of the things I’ve always found slightly disappointing about the classical composers I’ve met – there haven’t been many, lest you think ‘meeting classical composers’ is the sort of thing I spend my leisure time doing – is how very well balanced and reasonable they tend to be. Sure they get a bit jumpy around bright lights, and if you ask them what the best Canned Heat song is they tend to get up quietly and leave the dinner party (the answer is Amphetamine Annie, according to Yahoo’s Thomas J McCabe, who describes it as ‘a hard- driving and bracing song with excellent guitar work’), but outside of these quirks they seem relatively sane.

This is all well and good for their friends and loved ones, but I prefer my composers a little more completely insane. Like, for instance Rued Langgaard. Langgaard – late-Romantic, Nietzsche-addicted, and mad as a snake – was ridiculously prolific, churning out 400 odd works (odd in both senses of the word), including 16 symphonies, one opera (entitled, of course, Antikrist) and a gloriously dotty piece for organ and chorus called Carl Nielsen Our Great Composer, which features the choir singing ‘Carl Nielsen Our Great Composer’ over and over again – repeated, according to the score ‘for all eternity’. Carl had done rather better than his fellow Dane, so Rued wrote him this.

But at his best Langgaard is inspired – his Music of the Spheres is utterly astonishing, sounding like Ligeti 50 years before Ligeti, and I’ve just begun to work through his other symphonic works, which I’ll be reviewing later. For now though it’s his string quartets, and larks-a-lordy they’re good. Sure, he can’t keep an idea in his head for more than a movement at a time, but this is part of their charm – the pieces are mercurial – as one senses him moving on to whole new aesthetic beliefs from the first movement to the last.

The Nightingale Quartet play with gusto and obvious love, like they’re translating the cryptic pronouncements of their favourite uncle, accidentally invited to breakfast with their mates. They’ve won a bunch of awards for doing so, as they should. New popularity for Rued Langgaard. I think this would make him quite happy. For a moment. Then very, very cross.