Portici Quartet

The names of Johann Sebastian Bach, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Sergei Rachmaninoff do not necessarily conjure images and sounds of jazz in one's mind, that is until one has listened to recordings by the Classical Jazz Quartet. Although these musicians utilize the same instruments as the Modern Jazz Quartet, they are in no way clones or copycats of that groundbreaking group. They have very much their own sound and style. This is not surprising given the huge talent of the musicians involved; all four are virtuosos on their respective instruments. The themes, although composed in a different time and place, become excellent vehicles for complex, sometimes, bluesy, often swinging and always fresh improvisations in the hands of these musicians.

This box is a musical treat for all jazz fans, as no less than 20 original albums by the Modern Jazz Quartet are released here on ten CDs…

Over the course of time there have been many overlooked artists in classical music, because of their race and/or gender. It is important to acknowledge that we have not yet heard the whole story due to this sidelining of voices. Composers Joseph Boulogne Chevalier de Saint-Georges, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, William Grant Still, Florence B. Price, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, and George Walker, have all contributed beautifully crafted works to the repertoire, but are not widely celebrated. Another contributing factor to this unfortunate reality is access to their manuscripts and recordings of their work which we believe would lead to greater awareness and programming of their incredible music.

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.