Piatti Quartet

Piatti Quartet – Albion Refracted (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:11:20 minutes | 1,14 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Champs Hill Records

The Piatti Quartet present British music for string quartet, including two world premieres by Joseph Phibbs and Mark-Anthony Turnage alongside works by Britten and Bridge. The inspiration for the album began with their commission of Joseph Phibbs’ String Quartet No. 1 in 2014, premiered at the Rye Arts Festival, where audiences were enthusiastic to hear the work again. The Three Idylls by Frank Bridge are apt companion pieces to the Variations on a theme by Frank Bridge by Benjamin Britten. The finale to this British-themed compendium owes its inclusion to the Wigmore Hall International String Quartet Competition, where the Piatti Quartet won a special prize in 2015 for a performance of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s piece Contusion. This is the world-premiere recording of Twisted Blues with Twisted Ballad, premiered in 2010 by the Belcea Quartet. In this piece the outer movements draw on themes by Led Zeppelin, from Dazed and Confused and Stairway to Heaven and the central movement is dedicated to Fausto Moroni, long-term partner of the composer Hans Werner Henze with whom Turnage studied.
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Piatti Quartet – Boyle, Vaughan Williams, Moeran & Ireland (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 58:22 minutes | 1,04 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © RUBICON

Until recently we were unaware of the rich output of Irish composer Ina Boyle, who was never quite forgotten becauseshe was the only woman composer to be published in the Carnegie Collection of British music with her atmospheric orchestral rhapsody The Magic Harp of 1919. Boyle spent her life living at the substantial family home at Bushey Park, near Enniskerry, Co Wicklow, and she only left it for brief visits to London, including lessons with Vaughan Williams. At the end of the First World War she produced a brief choral elegy Soldiers at Peace which was widely sung at the time although rejected by the Carnegie Committee (revived in Hampstead in 2018). The Magic Harp dates from 1919 and a programmatic symphony, In the Wicklow Hills the mid-1920s. During the 1930s she produced a notable violin concerto
(in memory of her mother), a Second Symphony, an Overture for orchestra and several stage works including the ballet Virgilian Suite, The Dance of Death (a masque for dancing after Holbein) and the mimed drama The Vision of Er. A third symphony followed, setting Edith Sitwell for contralto and orchestra.
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Piatti Quartet – Mark-Anthony Turnage: Winter’s Edge (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 52:29 minutes | 970 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Delphian Records

Even at its biggest and boldest, Mark-Anthony Turnage’s music has always contained a thread of dark lyricism. Intimacy and tenderness of expression are never absent for long in Turnage’s music, and are essential to his large output of works for chamber ensemble – his mature string quartets in particular.

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