The Danish String Quartet made its ECM debut with three first quartets, each written when its composer was barely into his twenties. Thomas Adès's Arcadiana (1994) stands between Per Nørgård's Quartetto Breve (1952) and Hans Abrahamsen's 10 Preludes (1973). The pairing is close-knit, since Abrahamsen studied with Nørgård, and the album shows how three generations of composers found their voices in the same medium.

The quartet is Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen and Frederik Øland on violins, Asbjørn Nørgaard on viola and the Norwegian cellist Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin, who joined in 2008. The three Danes had played chamber music together since before their teens. From 2001 they worked with Tim Frederiksen, a teacher at the Royal Academy of Music in Copenhagen, as their mentor. The group won the London International String Quartet Competition in 2009 and the Carl Nielsen Prize in 2011. The album was recorded in May 2015 at the Reitstadel in Neumarkt and produced by Manfred Eicher, with Markus Heiland as engineer.

Arcadiana is a kaleidoscopic fantasy in seven short movements. Their titles point to Venice by night, to Schubert's Auf dem Wasser zu singen, to a tango mortale and to an Elgarian O Albion. In the booklet, Paul Griffiths writes that its "metres are prone to slip and slide, chords to mutate in meaning". Nørgård's two-movement piece carries the lean tonality of his teacher Vagn Holmboe, and its second movement is grittier and closer to Bartók. Abrahamsen, one of Nørgård's pupils, took on the minimalism his teacher had brought into his own music. His ten preludes set pulse patterns against modal, folk-tinged colours, starting with a rush of high tones.

Writing in BBC Music Magazine, Helen Wallace said the tango movement "comes at you with the force of a nightmare". She also heard the short Abrahamsen preludes as close relatives of the Adès. Andrew Mellor in Gramophone praised the quartet's "intense blend, extreme dynamic variation" and "perfect intonation even on harmonics". The New York Times later listed the disc among the group's best work on record.

This is the CD edition of the quartet's first ECM album, ECM New Series 2453, released on 15 April 2016.