On a Bonfire Night whose squibs were dampened by miasmic mizzle, the Hebrides Ensemble launched their November tour of headily obscure modern miniatures and offerings from the string quartet and mezzo canon — assisted by a lustrous Jane Irwin — to a disappointingly empty Queens Hall.

With programming as innovative as ever, this concert came on like a night-time stroll around the sort of gothic villa that you’d find on a pine-clad Italian coastline, a morbidly fascinating mix of bright curios, antique masterpieces and the lowering gloom of heavily flocked corners.

The baubles were Lutoslawski’s Bucolics for viola and cello, little buttons of Polish folk that fizzed off the bows of the violist Catherine Marwood and the Hebrides Ensemble’s artistic director, William Conway. By comparison, the sawn shards of Martin Suckling’s Aotromachd (“lightness” in Gaelic) for string quartet and mezzo lurked self-consciously in the shadows.

Meg Bateman’s lost-love poem comes in two halves, a concept that Suckling hammers literally. Irwin’s glossy mezzo gives warmth to the opening stanza’s cold strings, before the darker recriminations of the conclusion, a haunting mezzo hum interspersed with harshly spoken word. Compelling, if not altogether pretty, it doesn’t always pull off its buzz of ideas. One couldn’t help thinking, too, that size isn’t everything, as Berio’s substantial character miniatures, Duetti per due violini, were brought to vivid life by the leader, Alexander Janiczek, and an excellent Zoe Beyers.

Respighi’s Pucciniesque setting of Shelley’s The Sunset outed another unusual vein of mezzo/quartet repertoire — Irwin commanding if not entirely comfortable — before George Benjamin’s cranky Three Inventions for solo violin and the final mezzo/quartet gear shift of the night: Schoenberg’s idiosyncratic String Quartet No 2. A questing charge from Romanticism to Expressionism in four cock-eyed movements, its mezzo embellishment with Stefan George poems — Irwin in her dramatic element — jolt a final aural epiphany. A shame there wasn’t a bigger audience to hear it.

Touring to Mon (www.hebridesensemble.org.uk)

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