Patrick Kilbey’s Contemporary Composers profile (2/18) of John Luther Adams (b1953) remains the best general introduction to the music of this distinctive American composer. In that article, Kilbey did not specifically discuss any of Adams’s (to date) five string quartets but many of his comments hold good for them, too: the connection to Adams’s music of nature, specifically its being ‘the physics of sound’, ‘geography and geology’.

It should come as no surprise that Adams’s first quartet (2011; he does not overtly number them) was The Wind in High Places, in which the composer reimagined the quartet as a ‘16-string Aeolian harp’. untouched (2016), the next quartet and the first recorded here, revisited that same ethereal sound world, with ‘the fingers of the musicians still not touching their fingerboards’. Of fairly equal durations, the three movements, ‘Rising’, ‘Crossing’ and ‘Falling’, seem to describe an arch shape, like the rise and fall of a bird high over a range of hills. There is little variety of the glassy timbre or near-glacial tempo.

The most recent quartet, Lines Made by Walking (2019), is another triptych describing a simple arch, the movement titles indicating something of a programme. The upward- and downward-striving motions – again, with a very slow pulse – of the outer movements, ‘Up the Mountain’ and ‘Down the Mountain’, are straightforward, but more as metaphors rather than overt description, again relying on minutely varied repetition to generate momentum. Like them, the central ‘Along the Ridges’ is contemplative in its expressive disposition.

Both works are of a piece with Adams’s larger and better-known works and will undoubtedly appeal to enthusiasts. It will not appeal to everyone, but rest assured that the Jack Quartet’s committed performances are a model of flawless ensemble and intonation, captured in very clear sound.