Maggini Quartet, Wigmore Hall, London

Nurtured in classical soil, yet also needing to be heard in post-tonal ways, the harmony of modern music depends on contradiction. Perhaps this helps to explain the dearth of first-rate 20th-century works in a genre that is at the root of musical tradition: the string quartet. Many composers have dutifully tried it, but few – except for one-offs such as Ligeti, with his aural playgrounds that reject the past – have broken free of its dichotomy.

Peter Maxwell Davies, in his two Little Quartets of 1980 and 1987 respectively, heard last week at the Wigmore Hall as part of a major recital to launch the first of a new series of 10 Naxos Quartets, wiped the slate clean with a different duster. The infusion of their serial textures with devices taken from other times and places – the Middle Ages and India – was strong enough to instil in the listener a willing suspension of historical belief. Their elusive textures also intrigued the ear with flashes of timbre suggestive of glittering spume from Davies' Orcadian fastness, a vision heightened by efficient readings from the Maggini Quartet. True, in topping and tailing the first of the pair they showed some hesitation; but there's a fiendish lot of counting to do in these works before their rhythms fuse with the natural ones of bodies in performance.

Besides, they were surely saving their energy for the First Naxos Quartet itself, named after the noted CD company, and premiered alongside a prescient Quartet Movement of 1952. The commercial patron of the composer, Naxos took its place beside Haydn, Beethoven and Chopin as begetter of a piece that Davies described in terms of their influence and, indeed, of sonata form. It was certainly possible to hear the opening movement, lasting some 12 minutes, as framed in a scaffolding of textbook terms. Yet searching there for such things as second subjects was like finding faces in the flames: charming, but with little relevance to combustion. As in the following Largo, what counted for fire in terms of felt experience was less the changes to material via magic squares, taken on trust at the composer's word, than the switch from one kind of extreme material to another.

In essence, the method is Mahler's, from whom Davies has also drawn inspiration. But then again, the list of such figures is extensive, Mahler's opposite Sibelius, for example, being the icon for his symphonies. Could it be that in seeking a muse for his new quartet cycle, Davies is invoking unawares not the classical masters, nor Mahler, but that arch-constructivist of British music (and Haydn and Sibelius expert) Robert Simpson?