The Bingham Quartet have long included new commissions in concerts and this disc collates works mainly written either side of the millennium. Crowding In (1998) finds Simon Speare drawing inspiration from Balkan folk music across four continuous sections whose fast/slow alternation engenders a palpable sense of tension and release. By contrast, Janet Owen Thomas’s Fiori musicali (1997) unfolds as six contrasted pieces whose uniform harmonic trajectory suggests a variation process. On a larger scale, David Stoll’s Third Quartet (2002) has taken its subtitle from Shakespeare’s King Lear – the central ‘Storm’ representing the play’s climactic scene in music that is too slow-burning in its cumulative intensity, though the evocations of Cordelia do not lack pathos.

The highlight here is Michael Parkin’s Do Not Go Gentle (1999), itself a work which has an underlying sense of variation – the initial viola melody being audible in the ensuing build-up to a powerful culmination, after which a long-breathed cello cadenza ushers in an eloquent final section that reinforces the music’s ‘in memoriam’ character. Anthony Gilbert’s Third Quartet (1987) provides a scintillating conclusion with its sequence of tropes on Machaut’s Hoquetus David. Spacious yet detailed sound, informative notes and a valuable reminder of the wealth of string quartet music to emerge from the UK over recent decades – and of the Bingham’s role in making it happen.