The Royal String Quartet have made a good reputation in a fairly wide repertory, including their support of modern composers and in particular the avant-garde among their fellow-Poles. This is no light matter, with the experimental ideas much taken up in Poland since the fall of Communism. Two figures prominent in this new wave are Pawe Szymański and Pawe Mykietyn, born respectively in 1954 and 1971 so no longer enfants terribles. They share a subtle ear for string textures and a capacity for demanding much of their interpreters’ techniques.

Szymański is represented here entirely by short pieces for string quartet, after the fashion of Webern, and indeed sometimes also after Webern’s delicacy of texture. He experiments with microtones, with shared slow glissandos, with harmonics, with minimalist ideas like the endless ticking of two notes. The longest piece lasts almost 12 minutes; most of them are about four or five minutes long. They are often ingenious, beguiling to the ear, entertaining in their difficult techniques for achieving something very simple. But for a sense of making them the materials for longer pieces of music, one must turn to Mykietyn, and a string quartet lasting over 12 minutes. He too draws on microtones and profuse use of harmonics but the comparative length of his piece leads him to form a structure of a more ambitious kind than those of his colleague. There is still the sense that ingenuity is made its own end.