Perceptions of colour connect each of the works on the Solem Quartet’s new album. The musical styles range from Impressionism (Lili Boulanger) and neoclassicism (Henriëtte Bosmans) to the tonal contemplations of Edmund Finnis and Camden Reeves. Two encores complete a curious but not unengaging programme, one a song arranged instrumentally, the other an instrumental piece which turns out to be a song.

The opening and longest work is Finnis’s Third Quartet, Devotions (2022), cast in eight untitled movements running for a touch over 21 minutes. Do not be fooled by the music’s seeming inactivity, for the insubstantiality is a mirage, the inner workings, derived from the ‘Heiliger Dankegesang’ movement of Beethoven’s Op 132, masked by the instrumental textures’ quiet iridescence. Devotions is not really a conversational quartet, unlike Bosmans’s more conventionally constructed Quartet (1927). Bosmans’s colourful work is in three movements, fast-slow-fast. Its concision likely stems from its being composed when she was studying with Willem Pijper in Amsterdam, echoing the economy of her teacher’s works of the 1920s. It makes a vivid contrast to the Finnis, music almost from a different world.

The Blue Windows (2019), Camden Reeves’s Fifth Quartet, is closer to Finnis’s in its meditative atmosphere, but with even less surface incident. Its single movement rarely rises above piano in volume. Its inspiration was Chagall’s windows for the US bicentennial in 1976, a gentle riot of blues that Reeves’s music mirrors very acutely. Punctuating the programme are three briefer pieces, two of them in deft arrangements by the Solem Quartet’s second violinist, William Newell. Lili Boulanger’s delicate Nocturne (1911), originally for flute and piano, transfers well to quartet as does – surprisingly – Joni Mitchell’s ‘Both sides now’. Ayanna Witter-Johnson’s ecologically minded Earth (2018) – for which she provides the vocal element – adds a further dimension. The performances sound fairly definitive, and Delphian’s sound is excellent.