Avie’s third release of music by Elena Ruehr (b1963) follows two well-received predecessors (11/12; 2/15) and other issues on Albany, Centaur and BMOP/sound (5/15). A common feature running through her music is ‘connecting the past with the present’ – outwardly different musics from different periods, whether Pérotin or Hildegard of Bingen, Indonesian dance or jazz. These sources are evoked rather than quoted, the resulting material developed in her own personal way; the connecting thread is usually rhythmic rather than harmonic or melodic. Her six quartets (written between 1991 and 2012: she is due another about now) are typical of her, deploying a musical language that, while freely tonal and unafraid of dissonance, contains little to alienate listeners nervous of the new.

The structure of each quartet is unique to itself, having little in common with the conventional form, even when nominally in the four movements of classical design, as with Nos 1, 3, 4 and 6. The Four Pieces for String Quartet (1991), which became her first numbered quartet, and the Third (2001) are suites in layout, reflected in movement titles such as ‘Let’s Sit Beneath the Stars’ and the bracing ‘Estampie’ (No 1), and No 3’s ‘Clay Flute’ and ‘How She Danced’ (this last a vivacious scherzo). No 5 – with which disc 1 opens – is subtitled Bel canto but is, against expectation, a sequence of nine kaleidoscopically varied miniature movements varying between 50 seconds and three minutes in length, followed by a 10-minute finale, the beautifully lyrical ‘In the garden’.

There is a tangible community of spirit in these six works, too, even with the more notionally abstract Fourth (2005) and Sixth (2012 – to my ears the most compelling and integrated of them); perhaps not as interrelated as the three quartets by Fred Lerdahl (2/12), but closer to Robert Erickson’s (12/14). The striking Second Quartet, a quarter-hour single-span cantata with baritone, is utterly unlike the others in design yet sits comfortably within Ruehr’s compositional universe. Stephen Salters, something of a Ruehr specialist, is in fine – occasionally falsetto – voice, nimbly accompanied by the Borromeo Quartet. The Cypress Quartet, for whom Nos 4 6 were written, play the remainder with authority and complete assurance. Avie’s sound – mastered by Mark Wilsher – is beautifully clear.