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The Wire

Judith Weir would once have been my pick of these three composers, but John Casken’s String Quartet No. 2 stands out on an excellent disc by the Kreutzer Quartet. Born in Yorkshire in 1949, Casken studied with Witold Lutoslawski, and is probably best known for his highly successful opera Golem, premiered in 1989. There’s a knotty integrity to his music, whose outwardly traditional forms and tonal idioms shouldn’t distract from its enduring substance. The quartet exploit the medium’s resources with a mastery that suggests later Bartók, its idiomatic nuances of touch and timbre beautifully captured by the Kreutzer Quartet. Judith Weir, in contrast, feels the allure of postmodernism, and her String Quartet from 1990 is fey and beguiling. The disc concludes with the rather less memorable and certainly less idiomatic Songs, Dances and Ellipses by Robert Saxton.