Following up on their very well-received debut album ‘In Motion’ (2/21), the United Strings of Europe (formed by students at London’s Royal Academy of Music) have produced another intriguing, well-thought-through programme of new works, most recorded here for the first time. All are arrangements or adaptations, three of them made by artistic director and first violinist Julian Azkoul (whose reworking of Schubert’s Quartettsatz opened ‘In Motion’). Caroline Shaw provides the fourth, of her own delightful Entr’acte for string quartet (2011), a ‘riffing on’ – the composer’s term – the Classical minuet and trio, particularly Haydn’s Op 77 No 2. It is very effective in the larger format, albeit with only 13 players. Shaw’s and the swallow was originally a setting of Psalm 84, its music inspired by the humanitarian crises in Syria and on the USA’s southern border. Its translation by Azkoul into a string-orchestral piece is superb and provides an intelligent close to the album.

The two larger works make a very contrasted pair. Much of Osvaldo Golijov’s music leaves me curiously unmoved but the Three Songs for soprano and orchestra, setting poems in Yiddish, Spanish and English respectively, is an exception. Dawn Upshaw recorded the full-orchestral version memorably (DG, 9/07) but Ruby Hughes and the United Strings provide a magical reimagining of them for string orchestra (the arranger is uncredited); the composer’s delight in the performance is quoted in Azkoul’s booklet essay. As is so often the case, the larger canvas provided by Azkoul for Mendelssohn’s dark Sixth (and final) String Quartet – composed in 1847, shortly before his own death but commemorating that of his sister, Fanny – gives the music a more public aspect, reducing the original’s conversational intimacy. The United Strings’ incisive playing makes the arrangement wholly convincing, as too Joanna Marsh’s In Winter’s House (2019), originally a carol for tenors and basses, but glowing in the expanded range of English pastoral colours of the strings. Excellent BIS sound, as one expects; a cracking disc.