A new album of music by Robert Saxton has been recorded by the renowned Kreutzer Quartet for Divine Art’s new-music label, Métier. Recorded between 2022 and 2024 by master engineer Adaq Khan, the album will be scheduled for release in the early spring of 2025.  The CD and digital album contain Saxton’s String Quartets Nos. 3 and 4 and a Sonata for solo violin performed by Peter Sheppard Skærved and enhances Metier’s growing collection of the works of this very fine composer.

Saxton’s third Quartet was commissioned by the South Bank Centre in London and completed in 2009. In five movements, it is (as often with Saxton’s music) somewhat impressionistic with movement titles such as ‘Departure and Return’, ’Winter Light’ and ‘Sea Ground’. ‘Quartet No. 4’, a substantial work of 30 minutes duration in seven movements, was commissioned by Peter Sheppard Skærved for the Kreutzers with funding from the Britten-Pears Foundation.  The composer describes the work as a Creation/Life cycle from the first movement ‘Wavebreak’ with connotations of birth and nature, through to the finale ‘Daybreak’ which signals closure but also a seasonal cyclical process leading to re-birth.  Throughout the work demonstrates Robert Saxton’s acute sense of nature, time and space and is impressively ‘visual’ in its soundscape.

The Sonata for Solo Violin ‘Reflections in Time’ was commissioned by, and is dedicated to, Peter Sheppard Skærved and was completed in 2023. In five movements, it is inspired by Skærved’s drawings (he being a very fine visual artist as well as a prime violinist).  Saxton says that the generally muted colours of the pencil drawings bring out aspects of his landscapes and seascapes which “inhabit a fascinating world between realism and abstraction”.  

Robert Saxton was born in London in 1953. Guidance from Benjamin Britten and Elisabeth Lutyens was followed by study at Cambridge and Oxford Universities. He won the Gaudeamus International Composers Prize in Holland at twenty-one and was Fulbright Arts Fellow at Princeton, USA in 1986. He is Emeritus Professor of Composition at Oxford University, Composer-in-Association at the Purcell School and Honorary Research Fellow at the Royal Academy of Music. His music is published by Chester/Wise Music, UYMP and Ricordi. Recordings are on Sony Classical, Hyperion, EMI, NMC, Divine Art/Metier, Nimbus and Signum. 

Robert has been commissioned by the BBC (TV, Proms and Radio), LSO, LPO, ECO, London Sinfonietta, Nash Ensemble, Antara, Arditti and Chilingirian Quartets, St Paul Chamber Orchestra (USA), and written for the Huddersfield, Aldeburgh, Cheltenham, City of London, Lichfield and Three Choirs Festivals. He has worked closely with performers including Teresa Cahill, Leon Fleisher, Clare Hammond, Tasmin Little, Steven Isserlis, Mstislav Rostropovich and John Wallace.

Recent works include the opera The Wandering Jew commissioned by the BBC; a song cycle for baritone Roderick Williams; Hortus Musicae, for pianist Clare Hammond; The Resurrection of the Soldiers, commissioned by the 2016 Presteigne Festival, the English Symphony Orchestra and Kenneth Woods; Shakespeare Scenes, commissioned by the Orchestra of the Swan and trumpeter Simon Desbruslais; A Hymn to the Thames for oboist James Turnbull and St Paul’s Sinfonia; Suite for violinist Madeleine Mitchell and pianist Clare Hammond; Fantasy Pieces for the Fidelio Trio; Scenes from the Epic of Gilgamesh, premiered by ESO at Music at Oxford in March 2023 and released on CD in 2024; and Sonata – Reflections in Time for violinist Peter Sheppard Skærved. Latest commissions include a major organ cycle for Jonathan Clinch. Robert Saxton is married to the soprano Teresa Cahill.

The Kreutzer Quartet is acclaimed for its adventurous performances and recordings of works from our time and from the great quartet literature. Their fascination with musical exploration has resulted in cyclic performances and recordings of works ranging from Edvard Grieg, to Anton Reicha and David Matthews to Michael Tippett, Michael Finnissy and Roberto Gerhard, on the Métier, Chandos, Guild, Innova, Lorelt, Move, Naxos, New Focus, NMC, Tadzik and Toccata Classics labels. Composers who have written, or are writing, for them are too many to list! The Quartet has held residencies at York 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 to Wilton’s Music Hall, their ‘home’ near the Tower of London, and the Aldeburgh Festival.   This new album (and several more in preparation) continues a relationship with Métier which stretches back to 1998.

Album details

Title: Saxton: String Quartets 3 & 4 (possible album title ‘Reflections in Time’)

Label: Métier

Catalogue number: MEX 77138

Composer: Robert Saxton

Works/artists :

• String Quartet no. 3
• String Quartet no. 4
  • Kreutzer Quartet
• Sonata ‘Reflections in Time’
  • Peter Sheppard Skærved (solo violin)

Robert Saxton on Métier