What does Britain sound like now? Like a country longing for ideals and meaning following its abandonment of any sort of common cause or experience. The catastrophe of Brexit looms large. 

At least Britain still has talent. Manchester Collective is one of the nimble ensembles that have emerged from a British artistic landscape in which old infrastructural certainties no longer rule. It is a flexible, string-based group that plays with heart, soul and extraordinary technical finesse. Its ear for detail, sense of floating lightness and good taste in composers caught the attention of the Danish String Quartet, which presented the ensemble’s exploration of contemporary Britishness as part of its Series of Four festival. 

All the composers featured see beyond thinking of innovation in terms of tonality. The wild hockets and reels of »Muttos« from Christian Mason’s Sardinian Songbook tap a typically English handling of folk material, as do Dobrinka Tabakova’s Insight and Jonathan Dove’s Out of Time. Those pieces, and Andrew Hamilton’s absurdist musical jigsaw puzzle In beautiful May, speak of loss as much as Anna Meredith’s Tuggemo shrieks a sort of plastic optimism. 

The highlights were the half-lit remembrances of Jocelyn Campbell’s 3AM and Edmund Finnis’s String Quartet No 2. Finnis’s piece extends a salient, introspective form of British minimalism. The third movement, played without vibrato, seems to express a longing to exist beyond the confines it has prescribed for itself. Very British. Just as much so was the particular charm that flowed all night from MC-founder Rakhi Singh, who with her colleagues, played everything with astonishing, tender beauty.