David Bowie on hearing George Crumb’s Black Angels: Thirteen Images from the Dark Land for the first time said, “it scared the bejabbers out of me.” He dubbed it a “study in spiritual annihilation”.

Paul Dean, co-artistic director of Ensemble Q deserves a pat on the back for programming this rarely performed, harrowing and richly-imagined listening experience, one steeped in numerology and symbolism.

Crumb wrote it during the Vietnam War, in 1970. It’s rarely performed due to its extended instrumental techniques (such as bowing upside down) and use of percussion, metal thimbles, glass rods and electric string quartet.

Ensemble Q: Black Angels & Red Death. Photo © Gavin Rebetzke

Violinists Zöe Black and Anne Horton, violist Christopher Moore and cellist Trish Dean gave a brilliant reading of Crumb’s bleak behemoth with its borrowings from the Latin Dies Irae and Schubert’s Death and the Maiden. In the first movement, Night of the Electric Insects, the quartet were superb in driving the chilling, skittered whining like whirring helicopter blades.

One of the stand-out moments was in the tenth movement when Black, Horton and Moore bowed crystal glasses in unison with immaculate precision while Trish Dean accompanied...