The ground bass, a type of theme-and-variations much favoured by English composers from Purcell to Britten, receives a 21st-century makeover in Morgan Hayes’s Dances on a Ground.

The ‘ground’ in this case is, appropriately, a robotic, march-like tune for cello that asserts itself in unrelenting mechanical repetitions according to the rules of the form. But among the other instruments there is little consensus about the path the music should take. Though the theme resists for a time, increasin...