Music: String Quartet No. 2, Op. 16; II: Scherzo
Composer: David Matthews
Artists: Kreutzer Quartet
Album: David Matthews: Complete String Quartets, Volume Three
Label: Toccata Classics — TOCC 0060
Street Date: November 11, 2014

Purchase: http://bit.ly/TOCC0060

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, Bartok, Britten, and Tippett’. This third CD in the series presents the first three works in the cycle – the Second influenced by The Who and Velvet Underground – together with an early contrapuntal study and the first of Matthews’ arrangements for string quartet.

David Matthews: String Quartet No. 2, Op. 16; II: Scherzo

Toccata Classics is a label dedicated to producing recordings of the huge amount of top-notch classical music that the concert halls and major record companies are ignoring.  We make a point of seeking out interesting composers from less familiar musical cultures and from all periods, in the Nordic and Baltic countries, in central and eastern Europe, Russia and further afield.

Toccata Classics was launched in 2005 to bring you these forgotten gems. We now have around 100 CDs in the catalogue with, in the pipeline, recordings of music by Alkan, Alnæs, Ashton, Adolf Busch, Enescu, Ernst, Farwell, von Hannenheim, Glanville-Hicks, Grigoriu, Kerem, Kornauth, León, Lyatoshynsky, David Matthews, Oppel, Buxton Orr, Peyko, Rameau, Ramey, Reicha, Röntgen, Sekles, Shebalin, Tartini, Matthew Taylor, Telemann, Vladigerov, Wagner, Weinberg, Woyrsch and many more.