Annie Gosfield’s The Blue Horse Walks on the Horizon was written for the Jaspers. Inspired by the surreal radio broadcasts and codes used by European resistance groups in the Second World War, Gosfield’s complex 16-minute narrative opens like the Allegretto vivace e sempre scherzando in Beethoven’s first ‘Rasumovsky’ Quartet, then moves into territory as wild as a string quartet can get without actually tearing its strings out.

Wonderful moments and dramatic tours de force abound, whether suggestive string glissandos tracing sensuous curves in Caroline Shaw’s Valencia or the luxurious cello solo in Missy Mazzoli’s Death Valley Junction. Judd Greenstein’s finely judged Four on the Floor is consumed in frantic motor energy before breaking out into a superb Bartókian jog-trot and climax. The disjointed 18-minute skein of sound that David Lang’s almost all the time creates is a response to the question ‘can a piece begin as identical microscopic cells that then differentiate into other functions across time?’ Donnacha Dennehy’s Pushpulling, an exercise in increasingly ominous, skittling anxiety, is the only moderately disturbing music on the CD. The collection closes with Ted Hearne’s Excerpts from the middle of something, an intoxicating romp that is interrupted throughout like Haydn at the end of his Joke Quartet.