Peter Eötvös’s The Sirens Cycle (2015 16) is the Hungarian’s second string quartet, and like Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet it has an additional soprano part. Eötvös sets text not only from Joyce’s Ulysses but from Homer’s Odyssey (in Ancient Greek) and Kafka’s The Silence of the Sirens (in German). To generate his basic pitch material he conducted spectrographic analysis at IRCAM of audio recordings of these texts. There is no doubting Eötvös’s control over the string idiom. In phrasing and timbre, the quartet parts have a bracing vocal quality (albeit far from Joyce’s beloved bel canto). The soprano part is coloratura, lively, hectoring. There are some wonderful sonorities; the eighth movement, for example, simulates a vessel rocking at sea. But once the initial stylistic interest fades, the overall shape and focus are hard to discern. As with much avant-garde European music, being overloaded with textual references doesn’t help; and, as I suggested, Joyce’s text is so rich on its own that it’s difficult for the music to live up to it or to interpret it in an effective way (a problem in common with Rebecca Saunders’s disappointing recent Joyce-setting Yes).

Much shorter than The Sirens Cycle is Eötvös’s first string quartet, Korrespondenz (1992). Lasting less than a quarter of an hour, Korrespondenz is a musical dramatisation of some of the events that befell Mozart in 1778 as gleaned from the composer’s correspondence with his father. The declamatory quartet parts are wonderfully intense. Sparse texture heightens the tension, and the length is appropriate for the material. Crisp recording and the Calder Quartet’s precision playing make it an involving listen.