The ASQ opened this absorbing concert with a significant new work, composer Samuel Adams’s (b. 1985), String Quartet No. 3, Alma, of 2024.

Written for Amsterdam’s Alma Quartet, with whom he has previously collaborated, Adams says that the quartet’s title refers to that ensemble’s name, but that he was also drawn to the Spanish meaning of “alma”, which means “soul” or “spirit”.

The Australian String Quartet at UKARIA Cultural Centre. Photo © Tony Lewis

The son of renowned US composer John Adams, Samuel Adams’s third string quartet carries hints of his father’s work, for example his Shaker Loops, and, as ASQ first violinist Dale Bartrop noted, there are also hints of the extraordinary music of Steve Reich.

Samuel Adams’s Alma is a substantial work of around 21 minutes, and while his background is in electroacoustic music and he flavours this piece with a distillation of the spirits of an earlier, revolutionary era of composition, Alma is uniquely his own.

The short first element of this four-movement work is entitled Simply, and it opens with a slow, hypnotically rhythmic passage featuring a complex interplay...