Métier Records is delighted to present the February 2026 release of two piano quintets from composer Jim Aitchison, both drawing on his unique dual practice as composer and artist, creating music that responds to encounters with powerful works of art by leading visual artists. The collaboration between music, art, and artistry came together as part of a project with the the Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens, “Hearing Shadows Wordless Light”.
Both Piano Quintets also grew out of his close collaboration with Peter Sheppard Skærved, Roderick Chadwick, and the Kreutzer Quartet, whose fiercely intelligent commitment, and unique experience of working in visual art contexts have underpinned so much of Aitchison’s work over the past two decades.
Aitchison has always been fascinated with chamber music for piano and strings, inspired by the interplay of texture and timbre, and huge expressive range of the great masterpieces. His own piano quintets are astonishing and unexpected, recreating yet “busting down the walls” of the Germanic canon.
Neither of the quintets attempt to convey, ‘explain’ or illustrate the artworks. “Rather, there is an exploration of territory provoked and revealed in me: I am not responding directly to the artworks themselves but rather to the range of my own reactions emerging from experiencing them.”
The first quintet reflects upon Anselm Kiefer’s monumental Margarete painting from 1981, a pivotal work in his decades-long investigation of post-war Germany, and its relationship to Paul Celan’s important Holocaust poem Todesfuge. The music navigates the ambiguous territory between the polarities in these works — between substance and theatre, structure and freedom, lyricism and bleak reality. The gorgeous first movement juxtaposes two important figures of German culture: Wagner’s Tristan motif and Bach’s choral harmonization of O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden; the second views both Keifer and Celan through the prism of Albrecht Dürer’s enigmatic engraving Melencolia I, drawing upon the symbolism of the mysterious magic square. The third movement comprises an incomplete double fugue and a distorted reimagining of Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No.5, referencing fugue and dance present in Celan’s poem.
The second quintet, Transience Patterns, was made in response to the composer’s own experience of James Turrell’s subterranean Aqua Oscura (2015) installation at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens in Cornwall. The project came to life when Sheppard Skærved and the Kreutzer Quartet first visited the site, their deep engagement sparking the realisation of the music. Emerging gradually out of complete darkness, the composer ‘saw himself seeing’ — perceiving human movement through the seasons of life, through trees, sky, and water. This led to the conception of a quintet based upon Brahms’ canon Mir lächelt kein Frühling, passed through different filters by allusion to the different seasons.
Album information:
Jim Aitchison, Piano Quintets
Catalogue No. MEX 77141
UPC No. 809730714122
Artists: Kreutzer Quartet: Peter Sheppard Skærved, Mihailo Trandafilovski (violins), Morgan Goff (viola, Quintet 1), James Sleigh (viola, Quintet 2), Neil Heyde (cello), Roderick Chadwick (piano)
List of Works:
Piano Quintet No. 1, Margarete
I. Prelude and Chorale | II. Magic Square | III. Dance Fugue
Piano Quintet No. 2, Transience Patterns
I. Prelude | II. Blind Tide | III. Autumn | IV. Winter (Fugue) | V. Spring
Produced by Peter Sheppard Skærved
Engineered and Edited by Adaq Khan
Recorded at Angela Burgess Recital Hall, Royal Academy of Music
(Quintet 1 July 19th 2024, Quintet 2 September 1st 2024)
Jim Aitchison is a composer known for creating musical responses to the work of major visual artists, and he is a visual artist in his own right. His first significant work in this area was with Sir Terry Frost for the US pianist Andrew Russo, premiered at the Van Cliburn Modern at the Modern concert series in Dallas in 2002. His collaboration with Peter Sheppard Skærved and the Kreutzer Quartet began at Tate St Ives in 2005, responding to sculpture by Richard Deacon, and paintings by John Hoyland in 2007, for whom he composed his string quartet, Four Trajectories after John Hoyland. In 2008, as a Henry Moore Fellow at the Royal Academy of Music, he composed Fugue Refractions for the Henry Moore Institute with violinist Philippa Mo, and Memory Field after sculpture by Antony Gormley, performed by countertenor Nicholas Clapton and the Kreutzer Quartet at the artist’s King’s Cross studio.
In 2008–09, Tate Modern commissioned him to respond to their large-scale Mark Rothko exhibition, and during this period he also created a response to Doris Salcedo’s iconic Shibboleth installation, performed by Peter Sheppard Skærved in the Turbine Hall. In 2012, Tate Media published Shadows of Light II (after Mark Rothko) as part of the Rothko Room multimedia tour at Tate Modern, and since then Shadows of Light II has been performed by the NewEar Ensemble in Kansas City, USA.
In other projects, he has composed musical responses to Anish Kapoor for the Royal Academy’s large-scale exhibition, working with Peter Sheppard Skærved, Neil Heyde, and Michael Thompson. In 2014, while an Honorary Research Fellow at the Royal Academy of Music, he created a large, geographically distributed response to the art of Gerhard Richter funded by Arts Council England, working with curator Paul Moorhouse, Roderick Chadwick, and the Kreutzer Quartet, in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Music, Falmouth University, Yamaha UK, and Goldsmiths. In 2017, he was commissioned by the New Art Centre, Roche Court, and Poole Museum, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, to create music in response to sculpture by Anthony Caro for the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra.
In 2020, he made his filmmaking debut with Contrapunctus, a piece of video music about disconnection and psychotherapeutic harm, for the Social Distancing Festival in Toronto. In 2023–24, Arts Council England supported his large-scale new music project based at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens in Cornwall, working with Peter Sheppard Skærved, Roderick Chadwick, and the Kreutzer Quartet, with support from Falmouth University and Research England.
Recently, he has completed a new clarinet quintet for Linda Merrick CBE and the Kreutzer Quartet, commissioned by the Marchus Trust. His music is published by Composers Edition.
Recently described on Fanfare as ‘an incredibly musical pianist’, Roderick Chadwick is equally at home in experimental music and chamber music as he is playing landmark solo works of the last 100 years. Born in 1974 in Manchester, and making his BBC radio debut at the 1989 Aldeburgh Festival in a duo and quartet from Chetham’s School, he has since been heard performing Richard Barrett, Ludwig van Beethoven, Laurence Crane, Michael Finnissy, Will Gregory, Sadie Harrison and Betsy Jolas via this medium – and most recently, Bryn Harrison’s Towards a slowing of the past with fellow pianist Mark Knoop on the Radio 6 Freak Zone. He also gave a live performance with Knoop of Structures Premier Livre at the BBC’s Boulez centenary weekend.
As a member of Ensemble Plus Minus he has enjoyed performing music from Braxton to Paxton across the European new music scene: at Ultima, Huddersfield, Borealis and Warsaw Autumn festivals, regularly at London’s Café Oto, Edinburgh Reid Hall, and L’Auditori Barcelona (amongst others). He also has a long-standing association with the Kreutzer Quartet, with memorable performances including Finnissy’s completion of Grieg’s Piano Quintet movement at the 2014 Bergen Festival.
He has published writings on the music of Gloria Coates, Edward Cowie and Olivier Messiaen, including Olivier Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux: From Conception to Performance with Peter Hill in the Cambridge University Press ‘Music in Context’ series. He played two shared recitals with Dame Gillian Weir in Westminster Cathedral’s fêted Messiaen 90th anniversary series, and played movements from the Catalogue in an outdoor concert at Music in PyeongChang 2023, South Korea. His recording of the cycle, plus linked repertoire, on Divine Art has reached its final instalment, and a concurrent series of Edward Cowie’s Bird Portrait and Piano Sonata cycles has also won acclaim.
As soloist he has performed Lachenmann at the first London Contemporary Music Festival, given the first performance of Jeremy Dale Roberts’s epic Tombeau since Stephen Kovacevich in the 1960s, and Jim Aitchison’s Portraits for a Study on Disklavier simultaneous relay across southern England. Since being made Reader at the Royal Academy of Music in 2013 he has taught modules bridging performance and scholarship, and is on a lifelong mission to uncouple the words ‘dry’ and ‘academic’.
The Kreutzer Quartet is acclaimed for its adventurous performances and recordings of works from our time and from the great quartet literature. Their collaboration with Jim Aitchison stretches back for two decades, after its beginning with their first meeting at Tate St Ives.
The quartet’s fascination with musical exploration has resulted in cyclic performances and recordings of works ranging from Anton Reicha and David Matthews to Michael Tippett and Roberto Gerhard, on the Metier, Chandos, Guild, Innova, Lorelt, Move, Naxos, New Focus, NMC, Tadzik and Toccata Classics labels. Composers who have written, or are writing, for them include Simon Bainbridge, Laurie Bamon, Gary Carpenter, Gloria Coates, Edward Cowie, Jeremy Dale Roberts, Peter Dickinson, Michael Finnissy, Gregory Fritze, David Gorton, David Hackbridge Jonhnson, Hafliđi Hallgrímsson, Sadie Harrison, Hans Werner Henze, Michael Hersch, George Holloway, David Horne, Nicola LeFanu, John McCabe, David Matthews, Rosalind Page, Paul Pellay, George Rochberg, Poul Ruders, Evis Sammoutis, Robert Saxton, Elliott Schwartz, Roger Steptoe, Jeremy Thurlow and Jörg Widmann. The Quartet has held residencies at York University, Lund University and Goldsmiths University of London and has have given hundreds of workshops for young composers, in the UK and internationally. The Quartet has a truly international career, playing at venues ranging from the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, the Bergen Festspillene and Venice Biennale, and the Aldeburgh Festival.
