The Smith Quartet are often described as the British Kronos, a comparison which they are well able to withstand.
Yet as they work their way through a vibrant selection of dances by living composers: with John Adams' "Pavane" and Kevin Volans' "First Dance" the most familiar and Elena Kats-Chernin's "Naïve Waltz" the most elegant, one cannot escape a certain sense of having heard it all before and more often than not, from the Kronos Quartet.
It's not that the Smith Quartet are in any way hackneyed in their performances, it's just that one senses a certain lack of ambition in many of these "encore" pieces.
While Joe Cutler's "Folk Music" looks to the Tatra Mountains, Django Bates's "Peculiar Terms of Physical Intimacy" is inspired by Ireland and Donnacha Dennehy's infectious "STAMP" is a caffeinated riff on a 14th-century Saltarello, the originality on offer is not abundant through the disc's hour-long playing time.
As the bite-size nature of most of the pieces is wearing on repeated listening, perhaps the Smiths should raise the funding to commission a full-length piece from one or two of the composers featured here and really make a contribution to the repertoire and our listening pleasure.
