Four American Quartets

This recording gathers four string quartets by American composers who are widely divergent in style and manner and who have made a distinctive and personal contribution to this endlessly re-inventive format.

Finally completed in 1995, Ralph Evans’s First String Quartet is written in a non-derivative style, with tuneful melodies, lively counterpoint and piquant harmonies. Philip Glass has completed five mature quartets, his Second Quartet deriving from a theatrical presentation of Samuel Beckett’s prose poem Company.

The self-styled ‘bad boy of classical music’, George Antheil wrote three string quartets, the third of which is permeated by a folk-music ambience. Best remembered for his film scores, Bernard Herrmann had not released a concert work for 25 years when he wrote Echoes. Its title applies to the thematic connections unobtrusively linking the ten sections of this one-movement piece.