Kreutzer Quartet
Peter Sheppard Skærved solo violin
Metier mex 77138
Perhaps, like me, you first came across Robert Saxton when his The Ring of Eternity was first heard in 1984 and later recorded. I have always thought highly of his music, and with this CD continue to do so.
It opens with his String Quartet No 3 of 2009. This is full of energy but also takes time out to reflect and create impressions. The first, third and fifth movements are excitable and feisty, the second Winter Light is achingly cold and its fourth Sea Ground is highly intense and emotional, almost resulting in panic.
In his concise booklet notes the composer remarks that the ending on the unison note D might allow the listener to ‘imagine the opening of the quartet quietly resonating and beginning anew’. I played it immediately again as a result and it grew further in my admiration.
The 4th String Quartet centres around the idea of Creation/Life cycle and in its symbolic seven movements we find its opening one, Wavebreak, swirling around the note E. The pitch of each of the rest of the movements circle around a pitch a fifth higher which symbolises ascent. None of this is meant to imply key but the ideas are modally based. Movement 2, Time Spiral, is a Passacaglia based on the mode of B.
Other titles are Nightscape with its slow, yearning counterpoint, next with wildly, almost ecstatic part writing, and using a line from Sigfried Sasson comes…. ‘the dancing will never be done’. And the work ends affirmatively with Daybreak summarising all that has gone before.
It was Peter Sheppard Skæverd who commissioned that quartet for the Kreutzer’s, and it is to him that we owe the biggest piece on the CD, the almost 30-minute Sonata for Solo Violin ‘Reflections in Time’. He writes extensively about its slow genesis in a booklet essay, with musical examples. There are many facets to this complex work, but drawings and paintings by Skæverd himself, the idea of a river (both men live in London on either side of the Thames), and the palindrome as a form and concept, lie behind much of the work. The language is often diatonic but with much chromaticism.
The idea of time moving in both directions is also reflected in the tempi – fast, slow, fast, slow, fast, which of course is also a palindrome. I am left asking, is this going to be an enduring masterpiece.? We will need time to consider.
Review by Gary Higginson