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What the Apollo Chamber Players want to deliver on Navona’s Ancestral Voices CD is an overt blend of traditions as interpreted by four contemporary composers, all of them working in the folk/multicultural style that is common in modern classical (or sort-of-classical) music. Gilad Cohen’s Three Goat Blues is a genuinely odd blend, starting with a Jewish Passover prayer that includes a fable about a goat, using an old Judaic tune as its musical source, and giving the strings sounds beyond their usual ones in an attempt to combine some traditional elements with blues and rock-music-style effects. It is a clever piece, but not clever enough to sustain for its full 13-and-a-half minutes. Arthur Gottschalk’s three-movement Imágenes de Cuba, the finale of which supplements the strings with percussion (played by Adel González), also has the Apollo Chamber Players striving for sounds beyond the norm. Protest songs, the Cuban national anthem, sonic gestures, dance rhythms – all those and more are tossed together here in a rather disorganized brew that dips into expressiveness only occasionally and to no particular purpose. Malek Jandali’s String Quartet in E-flat Major is another cultural blend, this time mixing Western classical forms with elements from the Middle East. Jandali is Syrian-American, and many of the work’s melodies are old Syrian ones that Western audiences will not recognize but that listeners will have little difficulty associating with the part of the world from which they come. The six-movement work proceeds at a mostly moderate pace (two movements are marked Moderato, one Andantino and one Adagio). There is a certain sparseness to the string writing that contrasts interestingly with the sumptuous nature of many of the melodies, and Jandali has a good sense of variety in string sounds (the legato-pizzicato contrast in the Vivo movement, for example). But the work’s longest movement, an extended Adagio, is its least engaging, more gestural than expressive. The final work on the CD is Andean Suite by Javier Farias, in which the composer himself plays guitar with the string quartet. This three-movement piece mixes dance rhythms with extended solo-guitar riffs that are somewhat overdone, and the melding of the guitar with the bowed strings is on the awkward side – much of Andean Suite sounds as if there are two separate pieces that just happen to occur at the same time. The most strongly rhythmic sections, and the ones in which the quartet is given an opportunity for some expressiveness, come off most effectively. All the works on the CD are very nicely played by performers who clearly believe in the music and do their best to display it in the most-favorable light.