UK premiere of String Quartet No. 2

My String Quartet No. 2 is being given its UK premiere this 6 July at Clare O’Connell’s Behind the Mirror concert series in Berkhamsted.

The musicians are Clare on cello, with Jonathan Morton (violin), Clio Gould (violin), and Oliver Wilson (viola). They’re playing it alongside Debussy’s String Quartet – concert details here.

Here’s the programme note:

Friedrich Fröbel’s ‘Gifts’ were sets of wooden educational toys for young children. Simple shapes (cubes, triangles, balls on string) could be combined in hundreds of ways, to each of which he gave evocative names. The four movements of my string quartet use some of these names, and are called ‘Gifts’ – I like the idea of a piece of music being a set of intriguing gifts to the creativity of the performers.

The First Gift (‘He sinks deep’) sees the quartet breathing as one – moving chords, scales and sharper contributions across the canvas.

The Second Gift (‘To swing, swing, swing’) is a noisy, chaotic dance which finds its way to a lounge jazz-inflected Sarabande. This moves without a break, to…

…the Third Gift (‘Quite still, quite still’). This is rich, dark music, though the two violins sometimes glisten as a pair. Our jazzy Sarabande also gradually makes its way back into the music.

In the Fourth Gift (‘Forms of stars’), the first violin plucks a vaudeville number over a static, lustrous bed of sound.

The piece was originally written for the Adelphi Quartet and received its world premiere last year at the Lucerne Festival.

Last year these musicians performed String Quartet No. 1 in the same series (written in 2018 for the Arditti Quartet, and featuring half of the instruments tuned down from standard pitch), while Jonathan Morton has recently been touring my Prelude (after Monsieur de Sainte Colombe) around Scotland as Artistic Director of the Scottish Ensemble