This superbly played and vividly engineered release, featuring works from three continents and four different centuries, is the debut album of the London-based United Strings of Europe. Three of the performances are led from within the ensemble by the violinist Julian Azkoul, who also provides the arrangements used. That of Schubert’s single-movement Quartettsatz involves the addition of a double bass and additional strings at key points, but with only 13 players in the ensemble, the changes are modest and the performance is lithe and powerful. The arrangement of Boccherini’s Musica notturna, evoking the sounds of Madrid of the 1780s, is also circumspect, eschewing the castanets and other percussion instruments added in some other recordings. Instead, the third movement gains a violin improvisation evoking Spain’s Islamic history and the cello solo in the fourth movement receives embellishments in a country music style, and highly effective they are too.

Matthew Hindson’s Maralinga, completed in 2011, references the environmental and human impact of the nuclear tests carried out by the British government in the composer’s native Australia in the 1950s and ’60s. Scored for violin and orchestra, the work contrasts episodes of visceral urgency with moments of hushed expectancy before concluding with a lyrical epilogue of great poignancy. Dating from a year earlier, Arturo Corrales’s Señores, les voy a contar is a brief but rhythmically complex piece based on a song learnt from his grandmother in El Salvador. Both works receive animated and gripping interpretations under the baton of Franck Fontcouberte, with an impressive performance from soloist Amalia Hall in the former. Rounding off the programme is New Zealand composer Gareth Farr’s Mondo Rondo, originally composed for string quartet in 1997 and here expanded to use all the players of the ensemble. Farr’s playful and inventive writing makes an excellent curtain-closer for the group’s impressive first recording.