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”. Matthews’s three most recent quartets call in a wide range of references. Birdsong – heard in nos. 13 and 14 – is a standard Matthews topos; and the fugal no.15 seems to find a middle ground between late Beethoven and folk-music. No.13 presents the biggest surprise: it introduces four solo voices, siting the work somewhere between Berg’s Lyric Suite and Vaughan Williams’s Serenade to Music. Some touching arrangements and two canons for two Michaels – Tippett and Berkeley – complete the programme.

“Not only our most prominent symphonist, Matthews leads the way in maintaining the time-honoured genre of the string quartet...” – The Sunday Times, 6 June 2010 (TOCC 0058: Vol.1)

“It reinforces the view that, Robert Simpson apart, he is probably the most important British quartet composer of recent decades...The Kreutzer Quartet (…) are at the very top of their game in expounding this important and masterly score. I have no hesitation in recommending this disc.” – BBC Music Magazine, October 2012, *****5/5 (TOCC 0059: Vol.2)

“[Quartet No. 1] appears influenced by Schoenberg, Bartók and, in some of its aphoristic yet highly expressive melodic fragments, Janáček. Quartet No. 2 (1974-76) is more 'of its time'” – BBC Music Magazine, March 2015, ****4/5 stars (TOCC 0060: Vol.3)

“a tremendous achievement” – The Observer, 21 February 2015 (TOCC 0318: Vol.4)