Gramophone Magazine
October 2024
Editor's Choice

Kreutzer Quartet

Matthews, D: String Quartet No. 8, Op. 75
Matthews, D: String Quartet No. 16, Op. 161
Matthews, D: String Quartet No. 17, Op. 164
Bach, J S: Prelude and Fugue in B Minor, BWV 869

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’. The three works in this sixth volume of Matthews’ complete string quartets cover a quarter of a century but share the same basic features, not least a mastery of counterpoint, an impassioned lyricism, a sublimated hint of folksong and occasionally a sly sense of humour, all deployed to touch something essential in the listener. Matthews begins his booklet note with this release by saluting ‘my now nearly 30-year relationship with the Kreutzer Quartet, which has been as invaluable to me as Shostakovich’s with the Borodin Quartet, or Beethoven’s with the Schuppanzigh Quartet’.

"An essential and authentic document…by a musical master who should be much more widely celebrated for what he brings to today’s fractured cultural landscape." - Gramophone Magazine, October 2024