Now in his early sixties, Nicholas Simpson studied composition during the 1980s with John Tavener at Trinity College, London. However, one is more likely to detect the influence of late 19th- and early 20th-century tonality on the two string quartets heard here. The disc’s title, ‘Remembered Music’, is taken from a line by the poet Kathleen Raine, whose On a Deserted Shore forms the basis for the earliest featured work. Composed in 1988, Remembered Music for voice and quartet is an evocative setting that benefits from a thoughtful and sensitively shaped response to the text from soprano Charlotte Trepess.

Simpson’s style has sometimes been compared with his older namesake, Robert, but his music bears as much the trace of Eastern European and Scandinavian influences. His predilection for developing ideas from small, germ-like motifs is evident in both quartets. Bartók’s late Sixth Quartet is suggested in the String Quartet in G minor (2013), which opens hesitatingly with a rising and falling two-note figure. Passed around between the ensemble in a question-and-answer-type texture, this two-note idea takes on a more intensive character as the movement unfolds. A three-note pattern is heard at the beginning of a dynamic, dancelike second movement, which soon transforms itself into a syncopated folk-like tune. A slow third movement revisits the first’s two-note idea against gradually rising, wedge-like harmonic shifts that call to mind the sound world of Einojuhani Rautavaara.

The first movement of Simpson’s earlier String Quartet in C evinces a mosaic-like structure, while its Beethoven-inspired finale amply demonstrates the composer’s solid contrapuntal technique. The Zelkova Quartet display impressive control and command over the material throughout. Simpson reveals in the booklet notes that he only truly re-embraced composition during the 1990s, when ‘the great serialist terror was coming to an end’. Sympathetic listeners will no doubt identify with Simpson’s unfussy tonal style; others more willing to embrace modernist ideals and the spirit of the avant-garde may well dwell ruefully on the rather perverse notion that, as a point of comparison, James Dillon’s String Quartet No 2 was being written at almost exactly the same time as Simpson’s String Quartet in C.