Collaboration has been key to The Kreutzer Quartet’s tireless promotion of chamber music repertoire for more than 30 years. As the quartet’s founder and principal violinist Peter Sheppard Skærved observes in the accompanying booklet essay to ‘Something So Transporting Bright’: ‘Every work is the result or reflection of dialogue: between the artists, or with their materials, or their audiences.’

Developing these dialogues became especially difficult during the pandemic. Three of the four works contained on this recording bear witness to those challenges in various ways. Ostensibly, Thomas Metcalf’s 28-minute string quartet Pixelating the River is about the River Thames, but under its flowing surfaces lies a deeper message about personal struggle and strife. Delicate spectral-sounding moments and pregnant pauses are suddenly swept along by a torrent of brittle dissonances and angry outbursts (some appearing to reference the ‘Dies irae’ motif). Punctuated by eerie silences and linked by interconnecting sections of extended glissandos and portamentos (described by Sheppard Skærved as the ‘river-curve passages’), the music’s journey becomes trapped in intense vortexes full of angst-ridden expressionism. These various stylistic tributaries eventually flow into a final section punctuated by purposeful rhythmic unisons before a breakdown in rhythmic communication guides the music to the shimmering sounds of its opening.

Gliding glissandos also hover along the surface of another water-inspired composition, Joel Järventausta’s atmospheric On Blue. Drawing on the haunting watercolour studies of painter JMW Turner, On Blue’s slowly moving opening leads to a series of explosive outbursts between all four instruments before signing off with a forlorn folk-like microtonal melody. Sadie Harrison’s five-minute 10,000 Black Men Named George: The Multiple Burdens of Injustice was also conceived during lockdown, when the composer felt compelled to create a response to the murder of George Floyd. The short work’s opening and closing quotations from Martin Luther King’s favourite hymn ‘Precious Lord, take my hand’ are somewhat reminiscent of Gavin Bryars’s use of ‘Autumn’ and ‘Nearer my God to thee’ to mark another tragic event, the sinking of the Titanic.

Standing somewhat apart from the rest is Gloria Coates’s Piano Quintet, the quartet supplemented by Roderick Chadwick on piano. Coates, who died at the age of 89 in 2023, developed a musical language that certainly falls into the ‘once heard never forgotten’ category. In the Piano Quintet, quarter-tones are mixed with standard tunings while glissandos clash with crashing piano chords to evoke a landscape that is more lunar and granite-like than fluid. Inspired by the poems of Emily Dickinson (whence the album’s title comes), Chadwick and The Kreutzer Quartet’s adoption of slightly slower tempos across all four movements, compared with their first recording on Naxos, suffuses Coates’s microtonal music with greater intensity – as if all five performers had shone a bright light at every gesture in the score, etched and polished each one, then placed them back together.