Whose Boat is This Boat

Visions of a November Spring, James MacMillan's First String Quartet, was completed in 1988 and already bears many a stylistic trait of the composer who was to create such a stir two years later with The Confession of Isobel Gowdie, not least a mastery of the singing line and the distinctive, 'keening' quality of the string writing itself. The work is cast in two movements, the much lengthier second of which perhaps doesn't quite add up to the sum of its impressive parts.

Ernst Eichner was a composer of the so-called Mannheim School who fell into obscurity as the Romantics discarded the light music of the Classical era, and whose music has until now been overlooked in the general late eighteenth century revival – probably because the focus on music of the period has shifted from Mannheim to Vienna. But of course the influence of the Mannheim composers was continent-wide; Mozart's symphonies and keyboard sonatas from the late 1770s, for example, can't be understood without it. The chief musical attraction in Mannheim was the court orchestra maintained by the Elector of the Palatinate, outsized to match the Elector's mega-palace (at the end of World War II it was about the only thing standing).