David Matthews’s purposeful, imaginative and inventive music has rightly gained its own following, which the Kreutzer Quartet’s excellent cycle of his string quartets (14 numbered examples to date) is doing much to consolidate. This third volume returns us to the first three numbered quartets. But there is nothing tentative or, on the other hand, exaggeratedly flamboyant about these relatively early works. Partly, no doubt, that is because they were preceded by three discarded attempts in the genre. Beside certain of his European contemporaries the timbral and harmonic sound world is decidedly conservative – but unapologetically so, and rightly unapologetically so, because the music radiates a sense of purpose and goal-directedness that brings its own rewards, even if the particular works on this disc strike me ultimately as near misses rather than bullseyes.

The influences Matthews declares in respect of his First Quartet come from Bartók, Tippett, Berg, Schoenberg and his teacher Nicholas Maw, and there is an actual quotation from Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Op 110. This last is well enough integrated that it only jumped out at me on third hearing – less owing to my inattention, I think, than to my absorption in the wealth of ideas surrounding it. Whether the piece adds up to more than the sum of its parts – and it certainly feels like it is intended to – I’m not so sure, even after four hearings. The two and a half-minute concluding Allegro feels a little lightweight to achieve that.

In addition to all the above-named affinities, Matthews could not have been assistant to Britten for four years without something of the language and craftsmanly resourcefulness rubbing off, which is entirely a positive thing. His ‘commitment to a music that is…connected to the vernacular’ is less easy to spot. He mentions that the central Scherzo of the three-movement Second Quartet is ‘influenced by The Who and The Velvet Underground’ but he might equally well have cited Tippett’s Second Symphony. Be that as it may, the movement certainly punches above its weight. I’m less sure that the longish Elegy finale is sufficiently concentrated in invention to hold the attention, for all its textural fascination (shades here of Peter Sculthorpe, another credited influence).

The Third Quartet begins with a rocket-like gesture (out of Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements?). Thereafter Matthews risks a calculated process of ‘gradual slowing-down and loss of momentum’, and again I’m not sure he quite brings it off. By this stage I could not ward off a certain frustration at the music’s not staying longer with an idea in order to get the maximum juice out of it; and while its magpie quality may be engaging, it can also be a little irritating. An attractive, antique-sounding Mirror Canon and an arrangement of one of Scriabin’s late piano preludes round off the disc.

Lithe, agile performances from the Kreutzer Quartet, cleanly recorded, give a strong sense of Matthews’s musical profile and bode well for the (presumably two) remaining volumes.