News comes that the Barbirolli String Quartet has joined the European Concert Hall Organisation's “Rising Stars” scheme. I'm no astronomer, but these former students of the Royal Northern College of Music certainly seem rising stars to me. The four women are forthright, full-blooded musicians, afraid of nothing, not even the miaowing and scraping sounds of Evangelia Rigaki's String Quartet, given its world premiere at St Peter's Church, Winchcombe.

Rigaki is Greek, young and based in London and Berlin. She knows little about charming an audience. But she certainly knows how to be concise (her three movements take seven minutes), and the jostling mosaic contains at least a suspicion of musical logic. For friendlier sounds we had Joe Cutler's recent Folk Music, already a Barbirolli speciality. They treated it to their best smiles and gusto.

Wrapped around these modernities came two venerable classics. With Beethoven's C Minor Quartet (Op 18 No 4) the players' engagement wavered slightly: sufficient turbulence in the first movement, not enough élan in the finale. Brahms's C minor (Op 51 No 1) found them back on top, weaving skilfully through brooding intensity and the sweetly wistful to the dark blood tones of the finale. The Barbirollis should be watched closely.

Later it was time to revisit that old shocker of 1969, Peter Maxwell Davies's Eight Songs for a Mad King, featuring the howling and ravings of Kelvin Thomas, the pungent musicians of Psappha, and a BBC Radio 3 Discovering Music presentation hosted by everyone's mate, Charles Hazlewood. Maxwell Davies was also on hand to comment, pitching the piece almost as a work of his childhood; he composed it when he was 35.

Since George III, the Mad King himself, spent four weeks in Cheltenham in 1788 trying to restore his health, the choice of work was appropriate. But not the venue: the acoustic of the Pittville Pump Room clouded every word, adding another layer of incomprehension to the royal madness. Nothing stopped Thomas's impressive cavortings on and off his chair, up and down the octaves - he's a true and powerful actor-singer. But the blurring did make this raucous, poignant piece somewhat daintier than the composer had intended.

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