As at the second on November 27, they are playing works by Purcell, Kurtág and Mendelssohn.

With Schubert also being played next week and Mozart in November, the unfamiliar name over the two concerts by comparison is Kurtág – György Kurtág born in 1926 – whose music is wildly different to that penned by the familiar names.

It's a sort of advanced amalgam of Webern and Kurtág's countryman Bartók.

He is not overly prolific: 44 opus numbers and 14 works without opus number, the vast majority written for chamber music forces, albeit not always established combinations – he likes the cimbalon, for instance.

It is, however, the well-established string quartet formation which is heard in his all-important Op 1 from 1959, which the Elias is playing on Wednesday.

Indeed, his last opus to date, Op 44 (2005), is for string quartet. His first acknowledged work, the only one before Op 1, is a viola concerto written in 1954 without an opus number.

Prior to writing the Quartetto per archi Op 1, Kurtág was struggling to find an individual, musical voice which he succeeded in doing in the work.

Following events in Hungary in 1956, he spent a year in Paris where a Hungarian psychologist, Marianne Stein, changed his life by helping him find the musical form that suited him best.

He had recently discovered Webern, whose philosophy was why use 20 notes when one will do? Greatly appealing to him, he welded it to the language of the composer who was his god, Bartók.

The result was the Op 1 quartet, a "patchwork of colours and patterns" (Kurtág's description), written on his return to Budapest and dedicated to Marianne Stein.

Like all his subsequent music, a microcosm distilled to bare essentials, it is in six continuous movements and lasts around 15 minutes. The nearest the Elias has got to playing anything like it previously in Sheffield was Dutilleux's Ainsi la Nuit.

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