From the start the Brodsky Quartet created a favourable impression. They play standing up, cellist excepted, though the first violin had to resort to perching on the edge of a high bar chair because he fell of his bike in Amsterdam. Their dress code is informal, with the top button of the men’s shirts undone (internet investigation revealed their back catalogue includes an association with Japanese fashion designer Issy Miyake), and the warm smiles seemed genuine. It helped too that they introduced some of the pieces in what was a programme without any of the usual string quartet suspects, no Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms etc.

They have played with Elvis Costello and according to their website their ‘natural curiosity and insatiable desire has propelled the group in many artistic directions‘. If ‘Trees, Walls, Cities‘ is any indication their curiosity and desire is unabated. The piece which occupied the whole second half is a nearly new, hugely ambitious song cycle for the quartet and regular performer at the JdP, mezzo soprano Loré Lixenberg , who wore a long black dress with full length ultramarine blue shawl that my fashion consultant told me was pure Issy Miyake.

Commissioned in 2013, the cycle links the themes of conflict and resolution and eight cities where walls, and in several cases trees, are or have been significant: Derry- Londonderry, London, Utrecht, Berlin, Vienna, Dubrovnik, Nicosia and Jerusalem. If that isn’t complex enough, with contributions from a poet and composer from each city and another composer Nigel Osborne providing purely instrumental prelude, interludes and postscript, this is a work with seventeen ‘authors’.

It was a pity that the words weren’t provided especially as two of the songs were in German and also when Loré Lixenberg was hitting the high notes it was difficult to make them out. It was clear however that with the poets and composers having been given free rein, there were big differences of content, form, mood and style between the eight songs. With no unfolding story and the sense that this was a journey rather fuzzy, the impression that this was a song cycle was rather vague.

Nonetheless it was a highly enjoyable musical experience held together partially by Osborne’s rather mournful links but mainly by the marvellous performance of the Brodskys and Lixenberg. The quartet’s wonderful technique, togetherness and nuanced playing, which seemed to come from the heart, gelled beautifully with Lixenberg’s voice when it was at its luminous best in the middle register. Also some of the songs had instant appeal, the song for Dubrovnik was feisty and the folk-cum-nursery rhyme for London mischievously playful, and it wasn’t hard to imagine Bellowhead, the folk big band, doing a riotous version of it. Classical music buffs would have probably have taken pleasure from the references to Winterreisse in Berlin, and to Schonberg’s expressionist Pierrot Lunaire in the spoken recitation for Vienna. The performance of the setting by a Palestinian composer of an extract in ancient Hebrew from the erotic Song of Songs was just heart-achingly beautiful.

The first half consisted of rarely heard pieces from the string quartet repertoire. Turina’s ‘La Oracion del Torero’(1925) was both very Spanish and reminiscent of poignant black and white film music while Puccini’s short elegy for his patron the Duke of Savoy ‘Cristanemi’(1890) was all grief-stricken chords. Between these two pieces about death and Golijov’s sinuous and somewhat mysterious ‘Tenebrae’ (2002) in part about pain, the hustle and bustle of the Mexican Álvarez’s ‘Metro Chabacano’ (1991) was a bright bauble. The most life enhancing aspect of the first half though was the full- bodied, lithe and inspiring playing of the Brodskys. The bust of Jacqueline Du Pré no longer occupies the front corner of the stage but she would have been joining in the applause from her new position in the foyer.