Very clever. The Grosse Fuge is acclaimed in the notes accompanying this collection as ''the founding work of modern music'' and straight away, if you are of a suspicious cast of mind, you prepare yourself for laborious point-making or after-the-event justification of what looks like a very mixed programme of modern string quartets. No such thing: the works and their sequence have in fact been chosen with considerable care. One would not perhaps have expected that Conlon Nancarrow, still best known for his huge sequence of densely patterned toccatas for mechanical piano, would of all the composers represented here be the one to write an overt homage to the Grosse Fuge, but so it is. Alongside his complex but readily 'readable' rhythmic counterpoint (readable not least because the ideas have such pungent character), and after a slow movement of ethereal harmonics and open intervals (American pastoral; echoes of Copland and Thomson), there in the finale are Beethoven's trills and angular arresting figures, not archly quoted as ploys in the fashionable game of post-modernism but gruff gestures of acknowledgment; likeable as well as bracing.
Ruth Crawford-Seeger's Quartet sounds much more 'modern', but is in fact nearly 60 years older. The history of music is full of composers who are briefly lauded for having 'anticipated' this or that aspect of the style of a later but greater figure, but Seeger is one of the very few who do not dwindle when set against those she is said to have prefigured. Her Quartet, laconic, glancing yet formidably cogent, still seems assured and challenging despite all that has succeeded it; it is a classic of the contemporary repertory, and far too little-known. Seeger's continuing relevance is implicitly avowed by Roger Reynolds, whose 15-minute single movement, a study in cogency despite extremes of apparent discontinuity, holds the attention while continually challenging the listener to make improbable-seeming connections.
And a non-quartet to end. Xenakis's Tetra (''Four'') is a virtuoso study in texture and density, exhilarating in its almost visual imagery, though obstinate in its refusal to provide music in which four instruments converse and relate. Quite a journey, from the Grosse Fuge to this, but the Arditti's lean and sober account of the Beethoven suggests that he too, like Xenakis, could take pleasure in a dense chiaroscuro, an opaque, grainy black. The other performances are as commandingly assured as we have learned to expect from this ensemble, and they are very cleanly and directly recorded.'