It was just like the old days. Back in the 1970s, when the Fitzwilliam succeeded the Amadeus as the university’s quartet-in-residence, tickets to their concerts were like gold dust. It was the same on Wednesday: a sell-out for the quartet’s 40th anniversary concert.

Back then we appreciated the group’s risk-taking. Nothing has changed. This time, too, we enjoyed music from five different centuries, with a Purcell fantasia plumb alongside something written barely six years ago. The contrast in playing-styles could hardly have been more acute.

What has changed is the Fitzwilliam’s personnel. Viola player Alan George has put in the full 40 years, violinist Jonathan Sparey only five years less. But leader Lucy Russell has been around a mere two decades, while cellist Helen Tuach, a recent arrival from Newfoundland, was here making her Lyons debut – though you would hardly have guessed from her aplomb and ear for balance.

Fresh-sounding Purcell, and Jeremy Thurlow’s delicate and mellow Ancient Stone at Twilight (2003), were followed by sombre, reflective Shostakovich. His Eleventh Quartet rekindled warm memories of his visit here in 1972.

Celebration reached its apogee in Haydn’s last quartet, Op 77 No 2, which was blissfully forthright, bubbling with enthusiasm and joie de vivre. In Tchaikovsky’s storm-tossed Second, typically adventurous for the occasion, the group’s intensity never wavered. For encore, saxophonist Uwe Steinmetz joined in for a spicy new take on the Purcell.