Collaborative undertakings for the stage comprise a significant portion of Thomas Cabaniss’s oeuvre – not only operas but dance works and incidental theatre music as well. Yet this appealing collection shows him to be equally at home with the intimacy of the string quartet. Three of his six contributions to the genre are included here, spanning from the start of his career as a composer to the height of the covid pandemic; a sequel featuring the same ensemble in the other three quartets (Nos 3, 4 and 6) is planned for release in the near future.

Born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina, Cabaniss has been based in New York since the 1990s, pursuing parallel careers teaching at the Juilliard School and directing music education programmes. It was through his work curating music outreach concerts that he began collaborating with musicians from his former home town and embarked on a project of recording his complete quartets with principal string players from the Charleston Symphony Orchestra.

The ensemble, who gave the world premiere of the titular Four Elements (Quartet No 5) in 2023, make their debut recording with this release. The musicians’ warmth and evident enthusiasm for Cabaniss’s music are enhanced by the Dolby Atmos surround-sound production by Brad Michel, recipient of Gramophone’s inaugural award for Spatial Audio (for Stile Antico’s Josquin album ‘The Golden Renaissance’ – Decca, 2/21).

These quartets present a cross section of Cabaniss’s interests as a composer, drawing on music he originally wrote for a variety of stage projects (such as an opera about Denmark Vesey, who in 1822 attempted to lead a rebellion of enslaved people in Charleston). Shying away from formal innovation or extended technique, he uses a generally conservative harmonic language to convey his priorities of cantabile expression, vivid pulse and a dramatically involving exchange of ideas.

String Quartet No 1 (1990), the work of an ardent 27-year-old, reflects the composer’s responses to poet Wendell Berry’s Hidden Wounds, an essay about racism. Janáček’s quartets provide the primary musical impetus, evident in the frequent changes of metre and tempo as well as the use of speech-derived melody (the Adagio, the most affecting part of the work, alludes to Louis Malle’s Au revoir les enfants).

The more loosely organised String Quartet No 2, Three Dance Grooves from 2012, explores three examples of how a piece of music comes to life through what Cabaniss calls ‘a groove – a governing pulse, something musicians lock into in order to “stay in the pocket” as they perform’. Most compelling is Four Elements, prompted by the composer’s loss of a close friend and collaborator, the acclaimed opera director Graham Vick, who died from complications of covid in 2021. Cabaniss composes at times with a Vivaldian specificity of detail – the ethereal clouds of ‘Air’ and waterfalls of the finale, ‘Water’ – but it is the metaphoric rather than the painterly that interests him, his cosmos culminating in a love song.