Like its title, John King’s extended string quartet Free Palestine (2013 14; by my calculation the 22nd he has written) works on a number of different levels. Properly Book 1, as a second volume is being composed, each of its 15 movements bears a double title juxtaposing the Arabic melodic mode used and a Palestinian village abandoned during the 1948 Arab Israeli conflict. The music is, then, something of a fusion of Western and Middle Eastern, abstract and socio-political, through-composed and freely improvised. Influences from Terry Riley’s In C and Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony rub shoulders with the maqam’at and iqa’at, the melodic and rhythmic elements of traditional Arabic music.

A thought-provoking concept musically, then, superbly performed and recorded; provocative (as Steve Smith’s booklet points out) from its title alone. King’s immersion in Middle Eastern music pays undoubted dividends but ultimately I think his expressive purpose becomes submerged. Not even the elegant coup de théâtre of the composer leading the penultimate piece, Huzam – Khan Yunis, on the oud can redeem a work that seems to me by then fatally flawed. It is just too long, without the melodic or harmonic variety to sustain its hour-plus-long duration. (Curiously, the composer’s website lists the duration as just 40', but considerable freedom is allowed.) Despite many striking passages, too much is, frankly, imaginatively threadbare; at times the music seems to reside almost inside the Arabic models, at others to evoke from afar a Hovhaness-type fusion. Free Palestine is avowedly experimental but needs editing: there is a striking 20-minute quartet here struggling to emerge from its longueurs.