Half a century separates Daryl Runswick’s two ventures into the world of the string quartet. His first effort (composed in 1967 when he was 20) is a student work, precocious and jazzy and in many ways, for all its tuneful originality, conventional. There are four movements laid out in the standard Classical sequence (indeed this is in many ways a Beethovenian Quartet, not a bad model for a student, but this was the last time in his career he was to be so conservative). We have a sonata-form opening movement, a scherzo, a lyrical slow movement and a rondo finale. The Quartet is drizzled with stolen music (Picasso: ‘good artists copy, great artists steal’) – in the first movement I Got Rhythm, the 12-bar blues and even a football chant; in the second the traditional melody (probably not by Purcell) Lillibullero; and at the very end a tune guaranteed to get any British audience to its feet: no sensible composer would finish a major work with God Save The King, surely?

The Second Quartet (2020: Runswick was now 73 years old) sums up a long career pushing formal and stylistic boundaries: so unconventional is this piece that the parts are interchangeable – it doesn’t matter which instrument plays which. This means that, between any two hearings, what is the high music in the first may well become the low in the next. Runswick has steeped the structure in inversions and retrogrades – at any moment one player will be doing what everyone else is doing, upside down or backwards. Much of the music uses his ‘accidental counterpoints’ technique – the players start and end a passage roughly together but do not have to synchronise with one another from moment to moment. This produces tranches of music which seem to float timelessly – contrasting dramatically with more conventionally rhythmic passages. In the central slow section (‘The Wheel’, so named from the layout of the printed music) there is much silence. Fragments of melody arrive but the order of what is played is chosen by each player at the time of performing.