THE Smith Quartet’s residency at last year’s Festival – for which they received a Royal Philharmonic Society Award nomination – was so remarkable that it was fitting they should give a final day concert this year. Once again, their performance was remarkable.

They were perfect advocates for the thesis that string quartet form still has much to offer.

On the evidence of this concert – and from Insomnio and the Nieuw Ensemble earlier in the week – glissandi, harmonics and the vivid soundscapes they afford are currently in vogue.

There is a distant affinity with the soundscapes of Ravel, and Louis Andriessen wrote in the 1999 HCMF programme “Ravel’s the best composer of the 20th century. No-one says that, but everybody knows it”.

The UK première of Andriessen’s ... Miserere ... was the major work on the Smith’s programme. First performed by the Schoenberg Quartet in Utrecht in April, in the magnificent hands of the Smith’s it proved to be a dazzling and melancholy masterwork.

The concert opened with a witty little dumka from Joe Cutler, written as a gift for the baby son of the Smith’s second violinist Darragh Morgan. Michael Gordon’s Potassium relied almost entirely on glissandi to create a shimmering soundworld enhanced by electronic effects.

The concert ended with a welcome revival of Steve Martland’s 1994 quartet Patrol, which is not entirely typical of him. The high-energy muscularity is there, but some of it is slow-moving with a beautiful Britten-like third movement violin and viola passage.