Andy Teirstein (b1957) composed his string quartet Restless Nation (2010, rev 2020) after a sabbatical year during which, with his wife and two young children, he toured remoter areas of the United States to study its ecology, geology and astronomy. In six highly contrasted movements, this vivid and compelling suite records impressions of that tour, as in the first movement, ‘My Eyes were Hungry’, named after a comment of his son’s at seeing the Grand Canyon: ‘Papa, my eyes were hungry … and I didn’t know it!’ Succeeding movements were inspired by landscapes from the Smoky Mountains to the Rio Grande via (in the fourth movement) Goree Island.

Restless Nation’s finale, ‘The Way Home’, is the most explicitly folk-derived, based in part on ‘The Hangman’s Reel’, with a variant tuning for the first violin ‘borrowed from Arkansas fiddlers’. Folk music runs like a skein throughout Teirstein’s music and is central to his orchestral dance piece Letter from Woody (2011), inspired by a letter Woody Guthrie wrote to the expectant mother of his child in the 1940s. Teirstein’s orchestral output is relatively modest, so the symphonic poem – in truth, a five movement suite – he later extracted from it, with a solo harmonica prelude performed here by the composer, provides welcome textural contrast to the string quartet-based remainder of the programme.

Folk music from Teirstein’s travels informs the other two works, which by virtue of their instrumentation will intrigue many. Secrets of the North (2015 16) started life as incidental music to Isak Dinesen’s The Sailor-Boy’s Tale and uses extensively the Swedish keyed folk fiddle, the nyckelharpa, played with nice feeling by Marco Ambrosini in this nine-movement suite. Azazme Songs (c2017) goes one further, combining the Middle Eastern oud, played by leading exponent Yair Dalal, with the quartet and an Appalachian lap dulcimer (intended to emulate the sound of the Bedouin sumsumia), played by Teirstein himself. In four slightly larger movements, Azazme Songs evokes Bedouin camel drivers’ songs or hjennies. It is an enchanting set, on an enchanting album. Nicely balanced sound.