Kreutzer Quartet

The American critic Robert Reilly described the music on Volume One of this cycle of the complete string quartets of David Matthews (b. 1943) as ‘some of the most concentrated, penetrating writing for this medium in the past 30 years or more. It is musical thinking of the highest order and quartet writing in the great tradition of Beethoven, Bartók, Britten, and Tippett’. Matthews’ three most recent quartets call in a wide range of references. Birdsong – heard in Nos. 13 and 14 – is a standard Matthews topos; and the fugal No. 15 seems to find a middle ground between late Beethoven and folk-music. No. 13 presents the biggest surprise: it introduces four solo voices, siting the work somewhere between Berg’s Lyric Suite and Vaughan Williams’ Serenade to Music. Some touching arrangements and two canons for two Michaels – Tippett and Berkeley – complete the programme.

A first listen to the music of Gloria Coates is a breath of fresh air. Here is a genuinely contemporary sound, one that emerges naturally from our time and culture. Here are sounds to express our sense of time, space, movement and activity. There is no sense of is referentiallism. What a relief! There is no rehashing of someone else's style , whether from 10 or 500 years ago. There is no wilful difficulty to this music or the collaging of disparate influences.

Asked to sum up how he would characterize his two String Quartets - written in a neoclassical style and influenced by the sound world of Bruckner and Schoenberg - Michael Finnissy answered, rich and chewy! In 2011 Michael Finnissy created a daring new interpretation of Mozart's Requiem. To influence his completion of the parts left missing after the 18th century composers death he said ""I imagined Mozart in the present day, working to complete the Requiem, looking back across the centuries which have passed since his death.