Christopher Wright Quatre quatuors à cordes Quatuor Fejes - NI6291 - Nimbus Classics

The four string quartets largely span my adult composing career (of forty years) from my early twenties to the present and are the only single genre to which I have consistently returned. Their combined narrative represents a 'compositional journey' which has consisted of two parallel paths that in a sense glancing retrospectively over music’s 20th-century development, shadow it. Those two paths have both conflicted with and complemented each other; I refer to their lyricism-tonality on the one hand contrasted with starkness-atonality on the other, traits that have become far more focussed musically in a 21st-century post-modern world. From this perspective, these four individual works may be better appreciated as one entity through similarities - not initially intentional but now apparent - and their differences. Each quartet was conceived as non-programmatic abstract pieces of music however the first and fourth are 'descriptive' in that they were inspired by specific landscapes : respectively the East Suffolk Coast, and Beacon Fell Lancashire. Only the fourth quartet has a title and four distinct movements. (Christopher Wright)