MusicWeb International One of the most grown-up review sites around 2024
60,000 reviews
... and still writing ...

Search MusicWeb Here Acte Prealable Polish CDs
 

Presto Music CD retailer
 
Founder: Len Mullenger                                    Editor in Chief:John Quinn             

Some items
to consider

new MWI
Current reviews

old MWI
pre-2023 reviews

paid for
advertisements

Acte Prealable Polish recordings

Forgotten Recordings
Forgotten Recordings
All Forgotten Records Reviews

TROUBADISC
Troubadisc Weinberg- TROCD01450

All Troubadisc reviews


FOGHORN Classics

Alexandra-Quartet
Brahms String Quartets

All Foghorn Reviews


All HDTT reviews


Songs to Harp from
the Old and New World


all Nimbus reviews



all tudor reviews


Follow us on Twitter


Editorial Board
MusicWeb International
Founding Editor
   
Rob Barnett
Editor in Chief
John Quinn
Contributing Editor
Ralph Moore
Webmaster
   David Barker
Postmaster
Jonathan Woolf
MusicWeb Founder
   Len Mullenger


Support us financially by purchasing this from

Matthew QUAYLE (b. 1976)
String Quartet no.1 (2005) [23:11]
String Quartet no.2 'Sweet Insanity' (2006) [9:12]
String Quartet no.3 (2016) [21:59]
Avalon String Quartet
rec. 2016, Boutell Memorial Concert Hall, Northern Illinois University, USA
NAXOS 8.559851 [54:35]

This is my first encounter with the music of the American composer Matthew Quayle. Aside from composing and working to commissions, he's a pianist, chamber musician and currently holds a teaching post at New York University, Abu Dhabi. His compositional output is wide-ranging: in addition to his string quartets, he's written orchestral works, cabaret song cycles and solo piano music. The three string quartets here span eleven years: the first two date from 2005 and 2006, with No. 3 following after a gap of ten years.

Although in four movements, the String Quartet No. 1 started life as a single movement, written at a time of family bereavement. As well as conveying a deep sense of loss, it also takes a backward glance at the composer’s childhood days in Gridley Paige Road, a rural setting in the centre of New York State. Nostalgia and wistfulness pervade the music. Three more movements were added two years later. There’s a sprightly Scherzo, rhythmically buoyant and capricious. A slow movement follows, sombre and doleful. Quayle describes the finale as ‘enigmatic’, and that’s exactly how I found it, yet there’s a sense of optimism and hope at the end. It concludes with some glowing, luminous harmonics. In 2007, the composer made a string orchestra arrangement of the first movement, entitling it ‘Gridley Paige Road’.

A year later Quayle wrote his Second String Quartet, which has the intriguing title ‘Sweet Insanity’. A single movement, it paints a graphic portrait of the composer’s life at the time – stressful, insecure and filled with uncertainty. Its disparate styles – lyricism on one hand, spiky, atonal dissonance on the other - merge into a nine-minute canvas of turmoil and hurly-burly. It’s much more harmonically advanced than its predecessor.

Fast forward ten years and we have the String Quartet No. 3, comprising of thirteen linked short vignettes of everyday life – “a dizzying diet of news clips, You Tube videos, randomized song playlists and soundbites”. So, the work sounds erratic. The opening chords of Bach’s Chaconne make an appearance early on. The tranquil opening of the first movement quickly splinters into a series of life’s snapshots, no doubt a caustic comment on the irritating soundbites that inflict themselves on us today, pandering to an audience with a perceived brief attention span.

The Avalon String Quartet, who’ve had close ties with these string quartets since their genesis, give committed performances of these imaginatively constructed quartets; they obviously believe in the music and the composer couldn’t have wished for better advocates. Furthermore, they've been well-recorded. Matthew Quayle’s own liner notes offer helpful background and context, aiding the listener to appreciate fully these richly embroidered scores.

Stephen Greenbank



Advertising on
Musicweb


Donate and keep us afloat

 

New Releases

Naxos Classical
All Naxos reviews

Chandos recordings
All Chandos reviews

Hyperion recordings
All Hyperion reviews

Foghorn recordings
All Foghorn reviews

Troubadisc recordings
All Troubadisc reviews



all Bridge reviews


all cpo reviews

Divine Art recordings
Click to see New Releases
Get 10% off using code musicweb10
All Divine Art reviews


All Eloquence reviews

Lyrita recordings
All Lyrita Reviews

 

Wyastone New Releases
Obtain 10% discount

Subscribe to our free weekly review listing