Three string quartets by three composers performed by three different groups. In this sense, Bracing Change 2 is no different to the first instalment (8/17). However, in keeping with the spirit of the project and its title, we are presented again with three works that in very different ways offer alternative creative solutions to the challenge of writing contemporary quartet music.

First up is Mark-Anthony Turnage’s hard-hitting Contusion. Composed in 2013, this terse one-movement work, which takes its title from a Sylvia Plath poem, opens with a hesitantly pleading two-note gesture. This figure undergoes a series of tense and twisting transformations with each set of shifting statements, as if preyed upon like a festering wound. The music eventually ruptures some two minutes before the end, giving way to a plaintive cello melody that possesses a keening quality, before the darkness descends once more. The Piatti Quartet, who received the Sidney Griller Award for their performance of Turnage’s work at the 2015 Wigmore Hall International String Quartet Competition, offer a highly sensitised and nuanced reading.

As its title suggests, a series of slowly unfolding sustained chords in Paul Newland’s difference is everywhere (altered) plays on the paradox between similarity, difference and silence. The effect, as noted by Steph Power in a brilliant set of booklet notes, is to focus the listener on ‘tiny nuances of difference’ and ‘the sense of a shared time and space becoming physically palpable’ in the music. On the surface, the music’s sound world suggests Morton Feldman or perhaps late Cage, although Newland’s influences also extend further to the East.

In many ways, the highlight of the disc is Helen Grime’s String Quartet No 2. A powerful, compelling and absorbing work played with a combination of grit and polish by the Heath Quartet, Grime’s Second Quartet starts with a shimmering two-note undulating figure nested between viola and cello. The music then bursts into action with a more statement-like two-note theme that evokes Tippett in its rhythmic purposefulness, projection and drive. An energetic second movement draws on more hocket-like, imitative exchanges that often extend into the quartet’s higher registers, while a calmer, reflective third movement contrasts low muted textures with an animated middle section that spirals downwards by step, before shuddering to a stop with a series of faltering heartbeats. Powerful stuff.

In Sylvia Plath’s Contusion — written shortly before the poet’s suicide — the titular bruise is observed in the context of metaphors that detail irreversible emotional anguish. Mark-Anthony Turnage gives that torment musical expression, realised here by the Piatti Quartet. The 2014 work was a set-piece at the 2015 Wigmore Hall String Competition, where the Piattis won a special award for their interpretation — captured in this striking recording.

The pace changes with Paul Newland’s sparse and evocative work dominated by cluster chords. Quatuor Bozzini, who gave the 2019 premiere at Southampton’s Turner Sims (recorded here), present exemplary ensemble throughout this quietly powerful piece. Back in Wigmore Hall, the venue that commissioned and recorded Helen Grime’s String Quartet No. 2, the Heath Quartet interrupts confident descents with anxious tremolo; an idea that is later revisited through pizzicatos and glissandos. The final movement sees a complete break with what’s come before — a fitting way to finish this fine instalment of a worthwhile series.