Tippett Quartet - String Quartets 1 - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Though Miklos Rozsa became one of the most admired film composers, he had always written music in other forms and his two published string quartets reveal important facets of his musical background. String Quartet No. 1 was written in 1950 when he was under contract with MGM and, with it's nocturnal and folk-dance imagery, is redolent of his Hungarian youth. String Quartet No. 2 is prophetic of his later sparer style, though it too is infused with great energy and high drama. The String Trio, Op. 1, recorded for the first time in it's original 1929 published version, abounds with youthful vitality.

?Erich Wolfgang Korngold wrote a significant body of chamber music (the Piano Trio and String Sextet are on Naxos 8.574008). His three String Quartets reflect differing periods of composition. The First marries impetuousness with enticing harmonies and rapt eloquence. The Second dates from 1933 and has great clarity and rhythmic impetus, with a full complement of Korngold's lyricism. The post-war Third is more relaxed, unexpectedly juxtaposing the archaic and modern with a joyful conclusion. The acclaimed Tippett Quartet can also be heard in works by Bax, Górecki, Panufnik, Penderecki, Rozsa and Michael Tippett.

SOMM Recordings celebrates the 150th anniversary of Ralph Vaughan Williams's birth with insightful, deeply felt accounts of his String Quartets Nos.1 and 2, coupled with Gustav Holst's Phantasy Quartet, by the Tippett Quartet. This major sheds new light on one of the enduring friendships of 20th-century British music, Vaughan Williams and Holst having first met at the Royal College of Music in 1895. Vaughan Williams' early interest in chamber music was fired by lessons with Max Bruch and Maurice Ravel, which prompted his String Quartet No.1 in G minor in 1908, later revised in 1922. It reveals Vaughan Williams, as Robert Matthew-Walker's authoritative booklet notes suggest, Inchat his subtlest and most varied lively, intense and rhythmically delightful... Nothing quite like this had appeared in English chamber-music up to that timeInch. His last but one chamber work, the A minor String Quartet No.2 (dedicated to Jean Stewart, violist of the Menges Quartet who gave it's premiere in October 1944) gives prominence to the viola. Colored by wartime experience, it is a work of Inchturbulence and angst... an unemotional contemplation of bleak vistasInch that movingly gives way to consoling serenity. Holst's attractive Phantasy Quartet from 1917, heard here in Roderick Swanston's edition commissioned by the Tippett Quartet who gave it's first performance on BBC Radio 3's In Tune, is based on four British folk-songs and offers Incheasy-going charm as well as much playfulness and warmthInch. The continues the Tippett Quartet's championing of British chamber music on SOMM, most recently with Dedication which focused on Ruth Gipps' clarinet-led music (SOMMCD 0641) and was InchrecommendedInch by Gramophone. Their coupling of string quartets by William Alwyn and Doreen Carwithen (SOMMCD 0194) merited a five-star BBC Music Magazine review and was praised by The Strad for it's I