The Arditti Quartet was founded 35 years ago by Irvine Arditti, who remains its first violin. Unlike other durable string quartets, which remind one of a bike with a new saddle, frame and wheels, this one has, through him, a degree of living continuity. The long-serving cellist, Rohan de Saram, left only a few years ago, and while there has been a greater turn­over of second violins and violas, all have been distinguished. Arditti’s personal passion for new music — his appetite for commissioning it, the intensity with which he performs it — has few parallels. Most of the world’s leading composers have written for the quartet, and the results can be heard on some 160 discs. It is a great British success story, but you are far more likely to hear the Arditti in France, Germany or Austria than in this country. They have long been prized across Europe, where musical modernism has proved a hardy plant. Here, their enterprise has barely taken root, although they appeared at Wigmore Hall last night and will soon be at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.

I was glad to catch them at the Festival d’Automne, in Paris. In the clinical monochrome of the Opéra Bastille Amphithéâtre (more like an operating theatre!), they were reprising three world premieres they gave last year, and being unlikely ambassadors for British music. Though their second half was Dawn Flight, a fierce exploration of slab-like textures by the “spectralist” French composer Hugues Dufourt, their first was an Anglo-Saxon pairing, Brian Ferney­hough and Harrison Birtwistle.

The former’s Dum Transisset I-IV seemed, indeed, to suggest that “platonic England” invoked in the poetry of Geoffrey Hill. Like ghosts of a haunted house, the spiritualised essence of music by the 16th-century Christopher Tye flits through the four short pieces, lending a delightful depth to Ferneyhough’s surface complexity.

The Birtwistle piece was his elaborate though wordless response to the work of the Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean: The Tree of Strings, a half-hour movement unveiled at Aldeburgh. Birtwistle handles the medium with a masterly idiosyncrasy, evident in the string quartets that form part of Pulse Shadows (1996), his large-scale treatment of Paul Celan poems, and in the scoring of the chamber opera The Io Passion (2004), another Aldeburgh commission. The intricate interplay of austere lyricism and pungent ostinati could be by nobody else, but Birtwistle also embraces tradition. The scherzo-like section towards the end has a downright fizz, and the end itself is a nod to Haydn’s Farewell Symphony, the players successively exiting while playing. MacLean’s Hebrides seemed far away, but the cosmopolitan world of the Ardittis was as bracing as ever.

A cosmopolitan composer the group tends not to programme is Kevin Volans, who is linked totheir American rivals, the more demotic Kronos Quartet. Volans was born and bred in South Africa, but is now an Irish citizen living in Dublin. His 60th birthday was marked at Wigmore Hall with a Saturday of events: two concerts, a conversation and a film. In the 1970s, he was an assistant of that apostle of modernism, Stockhausen, but his career developed in such a way that he is often taken for a minimalist. This, as he said in the conversation with Annette Morreau, is something he resents. Indeed, the African-influenced, “hand crafted”, repetitive patterning of his String Quartet No 1, White Man Sleeps (1986), creates an expressive world very different from the quasi-technological processes of a Steve Reich. In this felicitous account by the Smith Quartet, the work’s originality was manifest.

Volans turns his folk materials into unprecedented string-quartet textures with an élan that struck me as Bartokian, although he never sounds like him. He does own a debt to Morton Feldman, that pioneer of prolonged stasis. This is shown in his ninth quartet, Shiva Dances (2004), a 25-minute meditation on virtually a single chord, and the beguiling new viola : piano, a premiere of which was given by the fine violist Garth Knox and an agile, octave-leaping Volans himself. A 1985 diptych for percussionist, She Who Sleeps with a Small Blanket, was brilliantly dispatched by Jonny Axelsson, but its metal half was much less arresting than the drumming eruptions later.

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