I warmly commended the Sirius Quartet’s previous album, ‘Playing on the Edge’ (11/19^US), for their fine ensemble and innovative programming, and this successor issue does not disappoint on either count. I had not encountered music by any of these composers, so this release has been a revelation, especially with such exhilarating performances.

Bruce Babcock’s Watcher of the Sky (2018) is a bracing, if brief suite celebrating the sesquicentennial of astronomer George Ellery Hale, with whom the composer’s grandfather worked. The four movements mark key events in his career, culminating in ‘Palomar’, the site of Hale’s great 200-inch reflecting telescope. The tonal language is in the tradition of Copland, Roy Harris and Mennin, and the quartets by John Summers and Gregory J Harris occupy similar stylistic terrain. Harris’s First, subtitled Landscapes, takes the listener through an array of volatile, dark psychological states, though the concluding ‘A Wild Wind’ is rather tame. Only the impressive, cogently argued first movement of Summers’s String Quartet is included here; a great shame. I hope the Sirius give us the entire work in due course.

The remaining three works are, in their very different ways, also compelling single-movement designs. Dayton Kinney’s The Canary Who Sang (2016) is a beautifully paced allegory about political whistle-blowers, Roger Fong’s Variations on Emotions a witty panoply of human emotions that would not be out of place in an early Shostakovich score. The pick of the bunch, though, is Daniel Burwasser’s Puck’s Game (2019), a vividly scored, rhythmic tour de force that catches the mercurial quality of the sprite from The Tempest to a tee. With fine sound, there is much to enjoy here.