Painted Light: Music for String Quartet
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Label: Delphian
Cat No: DCD34308
Format: CD
Number of Discs: 1
Genre: Chamber
Release Date: 27th October 2023
Contents
Works
String QuartetNocturne (arr. William Newell for string quartet)
String Quartet no.3 'Devotions'
Both Sides, Now (arr. William Newell for string quartet)
String Quartet no.5 'The Blue Windows'
Earth
Artists
Solem QuartetAyanna Witter-Johnson (voice)
Works
String QuartetNocturne (arr. William Newell for string quartet)
String Quartet no.3 'Devotions'
Both Sides, Now (arr. William Newell for string quartet)
String Quartet no.5 'The Blue Windows'
Earth
Artists
Solem QuartetAyanna Witter-Johnson (voice)
About
This inventively curated album from the ever exploratory Solem Quartet presents music that is awash with colour. The refined beauty of Edmund Finnis’s Devotions and stained-glass luminosity of Camden Reeves’s The Blue Windows are complemented by works by Lili Boulanger and Henriëtte Bosmans from the early twentieth century, when the depth and vividness of colour in Impressionist paintings seemed to spill into music. A sense of awed wonder before the natural world informs Ayanna Witter-Johnson’s Earth, for which the Quartet is joined by the composer as vocalist, while Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now – heard here in an arrangement by the Quartet’s violinist William Newell – provides a delicate lesson in perspective.
Sound/Video
Paused
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1Finnis: Devotions (String Quartet No.3) (2022): I
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2Finnis: Devotions (String Quartet No.3) (2022): II
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3Finnis: Devotions (String Quartet No.3) (2022): III
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4Finnis: Devotions (String Quartet No.3) (2022): IV
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5Finnis: Devotions (String Quartet No.3) (2022): V
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6Finnis: Devotions (String Quartet No.3) (2022): VI
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7Finnis: Devotions (String Quartet No.3) (2022): VII
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8Finnis: Devotions (String Quartet No.3) (2022): VIII
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9Boulanger, L: Nocturne (1911, arr. William Newell for string quartet)
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10Bosmans: String Quartet (1927): 1. Allegro molto moderato
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11Bosmans: String Quartet (1927): 2. Lento
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12Bosmans: String Quartet (1927): 3. Allegro molto
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13Reeves: The Blue Windows (String Quartet No.5) (2019)
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14Witter-Johnson: Earth (2018/22)
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15Mitchell, J: Both Sides Now (1969/2000, arr. William Newell for string quartet)
Europadisc Review
Although it has been the subject of heated argument among aestheticians, music is widely regarded as having the power to evoke (if not actually express): emotions, feelings, but also movement, space, the progress of time, and even the visual. Not just ‘pictures’ per se, but also qualities like colour, blurring, focus, framing, and so on. Many of these qualities are evident in a captivating new disc from the Solem Quartet on the Delphian label. Previously this group has featured on releases from the Divine Art and Orchid Classics labels. On the evidence of this latest release, entitled ‘Painted Light’, they should be much more widely known: their playing is sensitive, wonderfully blended, incisive where needed, but above all powerfully communicative.
Their starting point is a new eight-movement work by Edmund Finnis (b. 1984), Devotions (String Quartet No.3). Written as a response to Beethoven’s late A minor String Quartet, op.132, and particularly to its third movement (the hymn of gratitude that is the ‘Heiliger Dankgesang’), it alternates prayerful movements with others suggesting the human heartbeat – at times gently throbbing, at others irregular and anxious. Finnis’s music is minutely attentive to the careful weighting of harmony and dissonance, so that every bar draws the listener in and feels urgently consequential. The work’s culmination is the last-but-one of its succession of short movements (the longest is just over four minutes), which feels like a wailing cry that builds up inexorably, and is answered by the poignant hymn of the final movement.
Works by two important female composers from the early 20th century are welcome inclusions. Lili Boulanger’s Nocturne was originally written for flute and piano, then arranged by her for violin and piano as one of the Deux Morceaux. Here it is performed in a string quartet arrangement by the Solem Quartet’s second violinist, William Newell. It’s a strikingly beautiful piece, which opens with what feels like a mash-up of the Act 3 opening from Verdi’s Aida and the second of Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor. Towards the end there’s also a brief nod to Debussy’s Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un faune, yet this is a work with a strong individual voice, steeped in the language of French Impressionism, with a magically sultry atmosphere all its own.
Two years Boulanger’s junior, the Dutch composer Henriëtte Bosmans (1895–1952) composed her String Quartet in 1927. Its first movement combines Debussyan whole-tone scales and harmonies with earthier textures similar to Janáček's quartets of the same period. The third-movement finale is driven by an urgent, galloping figure (sharply defined by the Solem players), but it is the introspective central Lento with its soaring individual lines, gorgeously played here, that feels like the heart of the work in every sense.
The longest single track on the album is Camden Reeves’s 2019 The Blue Windows (String Quartet No.5), inspired by Marc Chagall’s stained-glass triptych America Windows of 1976. In the composer’s own words, ‘individual planes of harmony overlap, interlock, and blend into one another’. In many ways, this masterfully-paced work feels like a luminescent, mesmerising extension of late Beethoven (a strong influence on Reeves’s music), and its hypnotic beauty is infused with moments of intense dissonance and exquisitely-held single notes which are played with rapt beauty and expertly deployed spareness of tone.
Vocalist (and sometime cellist) Ayanna Witter-Johnson joins the Solem players for a performance of her own Earth (2018/22), which expresses feelings of awe and wonder in music and text that is both (appropriately) grounded and marvellously transporting. There are moments of percussive immediacy (the string players striking the wood of their instruments), but the overall feel of the work (and of Witter-Johnson’s gently amplified vocals) is one of simple amazement and appreciation at the mystery and beauty of creation.
The atmosphere of innocent contemplation is continued in Newell’s string quartet arrangement of Joni Mitchell’s 1968 song ‘Both Sides Now’, which appeared on her 1969 album Clouds. Mitchell is a musician and artist who regards herself primarily as a painter, and the music of this song with its gentle harmonic suspensions is powerfully redolent of the North American rural landscape. It provides a gentle conclusion to a programme of fascinating colours and subtle intensity, vividly captured in Willards Barn, Godalming, by producer/engineer Paul Baxter. With detailed booklet notes by Anthony Friend, this Delphian disc is a welcome exploration of new and neglected repertoire that makes for compelling listening for all lovers of the string quartet genre.
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