David Matthews: Complete String Quartets, Vol. 4

The American critic Robert Reilly described the music on Volume One of this cycle of the complete string quartets of David Matthews (b. 1943) as 'some of the most concentrated, penetrating writing for this medium in the past 30 years or more. It is musical thinking of the highest order and quartet writing in the great tradition of Beethoven, Bartók, Britten, and Tippett'. This fourth CD in the series presents Matthews' String Quartet No. 11, a set of variations on the eighth of Beethoven's Op. 119 Bagatelles, his own contribution to the 'Diabelli' Variations and his complete Beethoven transcriptions for string quartet.