Dynamic New York outfit Brooklyn Rider have quite a knack of marrying interesting takes on the mainstream canon with new commissions and their own original material. They have released four or five albums so far and the latest, A Walking Fire on the Mercury Classics label, is a cracker.

The group – Johnny Gandelsman and Colin Jacobsen, violins, Nicola Cords, viola, and Eric Jacobsen, cello – play with full-blooded energy but with precision as well.

This is immediately apparent from the opening work, Culei, a five-movement piece written for them by Russian-born composer and violist Lev (Ljova) Zhurbin, the son of prominent composer Alexander Zhurbin and the poet Irena Ginzburg. The work was inspired by the late Romanian Gypsy violinist Nicolae Neacsu, leader of Taraf de Haidouks, featured on the Kronos Quartet’s Caravan album. Neacsu’s trademark trick of dragging the bow across the strings for a percussive effect is a feature of the yearning “The Muse” section of the work. Other movements feature the infectious rhythms and blistering solos of the Balkan folk tradition.

At the heart of the album is an in-your-ear performance of Bartók’s String Quartet No 2 – one of the more accessible works of the six with its...