It’s been a great season for string quartets, with foursomes both imported and homegrown playing everything from the classics of the genre to the newest of new music. But lay listeners can be forgiven for making one simple query: what, given the universal excellence of these ensembles, distinguishes one from the other?

“That’s a very, very good question,” says Doric String Quartet cellist John Myerscough, reached in New York City prior to the English ensemble’s North American tour. “With us, there are a few things. I think we have a very specific approach to sound—both the sound we make as a quartet and the way we try to create textures within the ensemble. We’ve always really believed in having a great amount of clarity in the sound that we make, so you can always hear what the four voices are doing individually. It is also important to be able to play as one instrument, but we want that instrument to be a really big and varied instrument. We try to sometimes sound like brass instruments, or like the human voice, or wind instruments, so we really have as wide a palette of colours and sounds as we can possibly have.

“There’s also the element of what we’re trying to say with the music,” he continues. “We play a lot of music from the classical era, and Haydn in particular, and one thing that we really believe is crucial to the power of that music is the use of musical contrast. We really like to have emotional extremes, so that you don’t go to a concert when we play and go, ‘Cor, that’s a nice string quartet. That’s really nice.’ We like to take people on a really varied and rich and exciting musical and emotional journey.”

The program that Myerscough, violinists Alex Redington and Jonathan Stone, and violist Hélène Clément will play this weekend bears that out. Up first is Franz Joseph Haydn’s String Quartet Op. 76, No. 2; ending the night will be Ludwig van Beethoven’s String Quartet in B-Flat Major, complete with its original, and initially controversial, finale.

“We always try and start with a Haydn quartet, because Haydn was really the father of the string quartet,” Myerscough notes. “He kind of created it, basically, and his writing really showcases how the string quartet is basically musical conversation between four equals. And then Beethoven’s late quartets are the greatest pieces that we have to play as a string quartet—and particularly this piece, because we’re playing the ‘Grosse Fuge’ as the final movement. Everything builds up to this absolutely astonishing musical argument, where Beethoven is just really pushing the boundaries of what he can do. And the ‘Grosse Fuge’ sounds modern even today. It’s such an extraordinary thing that somebody could have created this 200 years ago. It’s sort of challenging and awe-inspiring at the same time.”

Between the two classical pieces is a modern one: Thomas Adès’s The Four Quarters. “Maybe he’ll hate me for saying this, but it’s not one of those pieces of contemporary music where it just sort of sounds like loads of weird noises and squeaks,” Myerscough says of the Adès piece, which compresses the 24 hours of the day into four short movements. “It’s still a very traditional piece, very rooted in the classical tradition of string-quartet writing, but in his own language. There are some amazing sound worlds that he writes, but he never goes in for any gimmicks, or makes us do weird things with our instruments. Everything is very naturally written for the instruments, but it will definitely make the listener think about how versatile the string quartet is as a compositional focus.”

The Vancouver Recital Society presents the Doric String Quartet at the Vancouver Playhouse on Sunday (November 23).