Robert Simpson - String Quartet No. 13; Quintets (Delmé Quartet)

Information

Composer: Robert Simpson

• (01) Quintet for clarinet and strings
• (08) String Quartet No. 13
• (12) String Quintet No. 2

Delmé Quartet

Galina Solodchin & John Trusler, violins

John Underwood, viola

Jonathan Williams, cello

Christopher van Kampen, cello

Thea King, clarinet

Date: 1997

Label: Hyperion

https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dc.asp?dc=D_CDA66503

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Review

This important issue completes Hyperion’s cycle of Robert Simpson’s 15 string quartets. No. 13 is a compact and intensely argued work, containing four linked movements in related tempos. No less impressive is the String Quintet No. 2 (with two cellos), Simpson’s last work to date, and one composed with immense difficulty after a series of crippling strokes. Two contrasting speeds alternate here throughout until the music spirals slowly downwards at the end, before breaking off as though in midstream. It leaves a feeling of extraordinary bleakness.

The earlier Clarinet Quintet lasts over half an hour, and shows Simpson pursuing a Beethovenian dialectic with characteristic integrity. Its opening pays unmistakable tribute to the fugal beginning of Beethoven’s late Op. 131 quartet, though the music’s actual substance owes allegiance to no one. The sudden, childlike innocence of the work’s ending is an inspiration of touching originality: elsewhere, the material does not, perhaps, always sustain the music’s length.

The Delmé Quartet, admirers and faithful interpreters of Simpson’s music for many years, play with great dedication throughout, and they have been well served by the engineers.

-- Misha Donat, BBC Music Magazine

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Robert Simpson (2 March 1921 – 21 November 1997) was an English composer and long-serving BBC producer and broadcaster. He studied composition under Herbert Howells. Simpson is best known for his orchestral and chamber music, and for his writings on the music of Beethoven, Bruckner, Nielsen and Sibelius. He wrote 11 symphonies as well as concertos for violin, piano, flute and cello. His extensive output of chamber music comprised 15 string quartets, 2 string quintets, a clarinet quintet, piano trio, clarinet trio, horn trio and violin sonata. The Robert Simpson Society was formed in 1980.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Simpson_(composer)

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The Delmé Quartet was conceived in a taxi travelling over London Bridge in 1962 by Granville Delmé Jones and Jurgen Hess (violins), John Underwood (viola) and Joy Hall (cello). Galina Solodchin joined the quartet in the late 1960s after the death of Granville Jones. John Trusler and Jonathan Williams joined the quartet in the mid-’70s. John Underwood is therefore the sole remaining foundermember. Over the past four decades the Delmé has appeared at most major European festivals. The quartet’s collaboration with a number of notable composers is well known, particularly that with the late Robert Simpson.
http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/a.asp?a=A102

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Thea King (26 December 1925 – 26 June 2007) was a British clarinettist. She studied piano with Arthur Alexander and clarinet with Frederick Thurston at the Royal College of Music. She worked as soloist, chamber musician and as a teacher but was probably associated most closely with the English Chamber Orchestra as principal clarinet from 1964 to 1999. King made a special study of lesser known works of the 18th and 19th centuries, especially those of Bernhard Crusell. She was Professor of Clarinet at the Royal College of Music (1961-87) and a Professor at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama (1999-2007).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thea_King

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