Although this was the first visit by the current LAGQ members, which consists of Scott Tennant, Matthew Greif, John Dearman and William Kanengiser, to Bermuda, the Island’s relationship with prior members of the quartet has lengthy roots.

The founders of the quartet in the 1980s, the Romero brothers, were frequent performers in the early Bermuda Festivals and the first number of the evening at the Earl Cameron Theatre, City Hall, Djembe (drum) was composed by Andrew York, a former quartet member and frequent visitor to Bermuda.

Djembe showed how a disciplined quartet can really work. It’s joyous and utterly authentic African percussion sounds were overlaid with a three-part echoing lute/harp melody.

Playing this must be a bit like playing Reggae plus: instead of the second guitar punctuating each offbeat there are three or sometimes four guitars who have to deliver three precise and separate offbeats within a fraction of a second to give the genuine echo effect.

Next, a selection of 12 Spanish Renaissance pieces Music from the Time of Cervantes arranged by Kanengiser and linked to themes from Cervantes’ Don Quijote.

The literary links were a bit tenuous sometimes, but the overall effect was a state-of-the-art renaissance court concert, full of energy and aristocratic partying. Dearman’s extra bass capability in his seventh string added power and depth.

Kanengiser had tuned his guitar to imitate the vihuela and provided a lot of the upper range sounds. Standout items were Tennant’s Guardame las Vacas solo and the Romance de Albuquerque.

The first set ended with arrangements of pieces by five contemporary “Guitar Heroes”: Ralph Towner, Chet Atkins, Baden Powell, Pat Metheny and Pepe Romero. For me, the Chet Atkins (Country Gentleman/Blue Ocean Echo) was utterly compelling; the quartet perfectly put across the ice-cream like smoothness of Atkin’s studio playing, including the drum machine sound.

Greif’s use of slide gave just the right impression for the Country Gentleman and the Blue Ocean Echo is a charming sound painting evocative of Bermuda. Baden Powells’ Samba Novo was a wild and rocky number, which reinstated the Samba form as a raw and furious force rather than the ancestor of the cool bossa nova sound.

The second half started with what for me was the high point of the evening, a composition by Ian Krouse after John Dowland’s (c 1600) Frog Galliard entitled Music in Four Sharps.

Tennant played the original lute piece beautifully on the guitar in order to show us what was to be the subject; then the quartet played the Krouse piece which consisted of a confluence of sounds flowing together and pertaining to the Galliard, sometimes like birdsong, sometimes like Messaien and through echoed rasgueados evoking the slight melancholy of late Elizabethan music. This composition was a masterpiece, beautifully rendered. John Dowland himself would have thoroughly enjoyed it.

Next came Cumba-Quín by the Cuban composer Carlos Rafael Rivera, a dazzling display of percussion rhythms produced by the musicians using wooden rings on their fingers to imitate the claves.

Our programme’s schedule had a finale for the first half consisting of a set of four American classics by Copeland, Basie, Sousa and York.

But to my disappointment these were not performed; instead, in the second half the quartet played the major themes from Bizet’s Carmen. While these were perfectly performed with plenty of energy they were, well, Carmen. We’ve heard it all before.

It didn’t stop the call for an encore, however, which the quartet obliged with Peter Maxwell Davies’ Farewell to Stromness.

This is a lilting, Scottish-inspired tune, but it’s mournful and was therefore a downer as a final piece.