On November 20, 2021, the UK-based Sacconi Quartet gave a 20th-birthday concert at London’s Wigmore Hall in which the centrepiece was the premiere of Jonathan Dove’s second full-length string quartet, On the streets and in the sky, written for them during the 2020 lockdown off the back of the success of In Damascus, the string-quartet-accompanied song-cycle they commissioned from him in 2016. I wasn’t at that Wigmore birthday concert but on the strength of this premiere recording, I sincerely wish that I had been.

Three movements long and around 22 minutes in length, this second quartet has captured with uncanny foresight what for many of us have turned out to be the abiding impressions and memories associated with those strange months – and in a way which speaks of that time in a truer, deeper and more beautiful way that I can remember any other lockdown-composed work having done. Tensely danger-aware, the first movement opens on driving, almost violent-sounding mechanistic figures (Shostakovich springs to mind, although Dove’s machine keeps breaking down), supplanted towards the end by a tentative, long-lined viola, before bleakly petering out via eerie col legno taps. But the central Lively movement then arrives with a burst of sweetly exuberant, high-harmonics birdsong – approximate transcriptions of a robin in a nearby park and a hidden bird in a tree outside Dove’s home – voiced with exquisite lyrical freedom by first violinist Ben Hancox. While this music is again fragmented, often tentative, it’s serenely so, and eventually underlaid with soft chords carrying us seamlessly into the prayerfully time-suspended Very gently moving final movement, its own music elegiac but also hope-filled, ascending gradually and radiantly heavenwards. It’s a wonderful work but it’s undoubtedly lifted to the highest heights by the Sacconi’s handling of it: in their mix of sharp and sweet, momentum and floating stasis; in their ease-filled technique and lyrical phrasing; and in their sheer ability to convey through tone, timbre and inflection the complex melange of emotions going through the average person’s head that year.

Between Friends is a two-piano work in memory of Dove’s friend and recreational piano-duo sparring partner of 40 years, Graeme Mitchison (1944-2018), commissioned by Charles Owen and Katya Apekisheva for the 2019 edition of their London Piano Festival. Its Gently moving opening initially feels like a near-seamless onwards extension of the quartet finale; but while similarly its Spacious third movement packs an elegiac punch, bells tolling softly around a slow-processing chorale-like line as suspended and modal harmonies twist the heart-strings, the overall impression left by its four movements is more of exuberant, playful and often highly virtuosic conversation – and sparklingly delivered as such here by its commissioners.

Who Wrote the Book of Love? (2014), a 24-strong, string-quartet-accompanied song-cycle commissioned by the Dante Quartet and written in collaboration with Dove’s regular writing partner Alasdair Middleton, then brings back the Sacconi to star alongside the cycle’s original baritone, French-Canadian baritone Philippe Sly. Compellingly direct of expression, this depicts the many guises love can take via a roller coaster of styles and moods that manages nevertheless to be fascinatingly cohesive. It is recorded with chameleon-like flair and theatre, Sly’s diction unfailingly crystal-clear.

Add Dove’s wistful, single-movement Vanishing Gold (2019) – deftly scored multi-textures, written for the Endellion Quartet as they celebrated their 40th anniversary and disbanded – and excitingly immediate, polished capturing, and you couldn’t hope for a finer way in which to discover the chamber world of this important British composer most recognised for his opera and vocal music. Essential listening, whether contemporary is usually your bag or not.