Gramophone Magazine
March 2021
Editor's Choice

Nightingale String Quartet

Holmboe: String Quartet No. 1, Op. 46
Holmboe: String Quartet No. 3, Op. 48
Holmboe: String Quartet No. 15, Op. 135

"After award-winning Langgaard recordings, the Nightingale String Quartet turns to one of the great unsung quartet cycles of the last century, that of Vagn Holmboe (1909 1909-1996). Volume 1 in this new cycle takes in the composer’s first published quartet, his momentum momentum-fueled Quartet No. 3 and his taut Quartet No. 15 with its pathos-imbued Funeral march. These are fresh new performances that support the idea that the deeper you dig into Holmboe’s music, the more you find."

"It must be said that these new accounts by the Nightingale Quartet are at the very least competitive with their forebears and the finest to date sonically...Overall, this is a most promising start to an essential, richly recorded survey of what, as the late Robert Layton observed, remains a match for any other quartet cycle produced in the second half of the twentieth century." - Gramophone Magazine, March 2021.