New Classics

The woodwind quartet provides a unique opportunity for composers to closely explore the individual and very different characteristics, timbres and ranges of each of the four instruments, offering a diverse and evocative scope of compositional colours. On this delightful CD, the London Myriad ensemble give joyful and brilliant performances of music that includes beautifully textured quartets by Claude Arrieu, Eugène Bozza (his lovely Trois pièces pour une musique de nuit) and French neoclassical composer Jean Françaix, as well as the whimsical Travel Notes (including a relaxing ride In a bath-chair) by Richard Rodney Bennett, Frank Bridge’s sparkling Divertimenti and the iridescent Deux Mouvements by Jacques Ibert.

London Myriad was formed in 2004 by a group of young musicians from the London colleges and fifteen years later its members all share a continued passion for chamber music. It was formed as a diversifying ensemble with a wind quartet at its core and over the years the group has performed a broad range of repertoire ranging from duos to nonets with programmes which have also included strings, harp, piano and narrator in recitals and concerts both in the UK and abroad. Tuneful, exciting, peaceful, humorous, fascinating music for woodwind ensemble can be all of these and this new album presents serious and lighter pieces of impressionist and post-Romantic inclination from the 20th century. It includes the premiere recording of the beautiful Suite en Quatre by French female composer Claude Arrieu.

FOUR is the first of an audio pair: one which champions existing music and one which carves out new repertoire for wind quartet. The second recording of the pair will be a commission of new works for the same combination and will be released in the future as FOUR|2.

—John Pitt