Bracing Change 2

Album review

It is unusual that a group of newly commissioned string quartets by only moderately familiar composers would hit classical best-seller lists, but that is just what happened to the NMC release in the spring of 2023. Bracing Change is the title of a new collaboration between that label and London's Wigmore Hall, begun in 2017, paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, and then restarted with this release. There are three quartets, one each by Mark-Anthony Turnage, Paul Newland, and Helen Grime, all contemporary in idiom but expressive and appealing to general audiences. Grime's quartet is in three movements and is an intensely dramatic, somehow Beethovenian work, coinciding not only with the pandemic but with the birth of the composer's child. It makes a good foil for the almost minimal difference is everywhere (altered) of Paul Newland, which makes its way through minute changes to a set of block chords. Mark-Anthony Turnage's Contusion, taking its name and inspiration from a poem by Sylvia Plath, shows how the composer's pleasant, rhythmically oriented idiom can be inflected in a highly serious direction. That work is performed by the Piatti Quartet, which won a contest dedicated to the work's interpretation, so listeners can possibly take this reading as definitive. The other two works are performed by different quartets, the Quatuor Bozzini for the Newland and the Heath Quartet for the Grime. The performances are fine, although the sonics do not form a coherent group. The success of this album bodes well for audiences' interest in contemporary chamber music.

© James Manheim /TiVo