Two of New York’s finest contemporary string quartets have been showcased in the up-close Utzon Music series at Sydney Opera House in rapid succession, giving local music lovers a fascinating insight into the current culture of the “city that never sleeps”.

Last month, Brooklyn Rider showed why they have been dubbed a “rock star” ensemble with their Sydney Opera House debut recital in the Utzon Room. This week it was the turn of the JACK Quartet, who since they were founded in 2005 have been pushing the boundaries and presenting new works.

The GRAMMY-nominated foursome – violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards and cellist Jay Campbell – lived up to their promise of “rewriting history, re-tuning our instruments, and playfully thumbing our noses at that great quartet tradition” in a programme of five works, culminating in the Australian premier of a 30-minute piece String Creatures written for them by Perth-born, Sydney-based composer Liza Lim.

JACK Quartet, Utzon Room, Sydney Opera House. Photo © Cassandra Hannagan

True to the vision of “rewriting history” the first half included arrangements of works from the Renaissance period, alongside pieces by contemporary US composers Johnny MacMillan and Amy Williams, both of which feature snatches of older works as an undercoat, much like a pentimento painting.

Both Italian theorist and composer Nicolà Vicentino (1511-75) and English organist Nathaniel Giles (1558-1633) were experimental in their day. Vicentino studied ancient Greek music theory and invented a microtonal harpsichord keyboard with 31 equal parts to the octave instead of the normal 12 used in western music.

Giles, on the other hand, experimented with variations of rhythms in his instrumental duo Miserere, which Otto adapted for quartet and which got the afternoon off to a bright start with violin and cello duetting over plucked rhythms – with the viola later taking up the lead role – building to a ceilidh-like abandon.

JACK Quartet, Utzon Room, Sydney Opera House. Photo © Cassandra Hannagan

Vicentino’s motet for four voices, Madonna il poco dolce, still sounds strange to modern ears trained to more conventional polyphony. His microtonal keyboard never caught on, and if you watch the YouTube video of Johannes Keller performing the piece on a modern reconstruction you can see that it was certainly unwieldy for anything above a gentle canter.

Williams was also inspired by Vicentino’s choral music for Tangled Madrigal, a work commissioned by JACK. Out of a patina of sliding insect sounds at the top of the fingerboard emerges a madrigal theme amid complex rhythmic shifts and pauses. Solo cadenza passages are thrown around after a yearning passage from Richards’ viola – first Campbell’s cello then Wulliman’s lead violin, accompanied by whiplike bow strokes then some manic agitated bowing by the ensemble.

MacMillan’s Songs from the Seventh Floor wanders in and out of the Renaissance, with elaborately ornamented figures one moment and atonal slides and pizzicato the next. It all accelerates to a joyful dance full of trills – all played with exceptional skill, including Campbell’s jaw-dropping use of two-bow cello, proving a chordal bass line to the piece.

Lim’s String Creatures emerged from workshops with the quartet in which the musicians had to learn the art of escape, having been literally tied to their instruments with string.

Experimental bowing techniques produce an extraordinary range of sounds and effects – some of them not pleasant, like the grinding opening moments and some harsh edge-of-the-teeth moments like chalk being dragged across a slate – while slides, driving rhythms then the slowing down with harmonics and accidentals all add up to a menagerie or aviary of calls from birds and insects.

At times Otto’s dragged bowing evoked Tuvan throat music, while at others the mewling of seagulls and the two-note call of the cuckoo can be heard.

This was an afternoon of outstanding musicianship and a programme which, in the first half, bestrode the ancient and modern worlds, while unleashing all the iconoclastic delights of today in the second.

JACK Quartet plays UKARIA Cultural Centre, Adelaide, 7 April, and Melbourne Recital Centre, 10 April.