String Quartets Nos. 5-7 – Matthew Taylor

Somewhere in an English attic, one likes to imagine, there is a shelf of scores by composers who never quite fit the fashions of their moment — Robert Simpson’s symphonies, Edmund Rubbra’s, the whole lineage of British composers who kept faith with large forms and long argument while the world around them chased serialism, then minimalism, then whatever came next. Matthew Taylor belongs on that shelf. This disc of three string quartets, his fifth, sixth, and seventh, makes the case with unusual persuasiveness.

Taylor was born in 1964 and studied with Robert Simpson and Sir Lennox Berkeley. You can hear both lineages if you listen for them, though he stopped sounding like anyone but himself long ago. What strikes me first, and what struck me on a second and third hearing too, is the confidence of his part-writing. These are not quartets that hide behind gesture. Every voice has somewhere to go.

The Fifth Quartet, op. 35, dates from 2007–08 and opens in a state of high nervous tension: jagged downbeats, sforzando accents that land like a slammed door. Taylor has spoken of Beethoven’s Quartet in F minor, op. 95, as a shadow behind this opening, and once you know that you cannot unhear it. The same coiled compression. The same refusal to waste a note. But where Beethoven explodes outward, Taylor spirals inward, through an Allegro furioso and a strenuously argued fugue, toward a final Lullaby that manages the difficult trick of sounding both inevitable and quietly devastating. The Dante Quartet plays it here with unshowy intelligence, no interpretive throat-clearing, straight to the nerve.

The Sixth Quartet, op. 36, was begun two years earlier than the Fifth but finished the same year, and it inhabits a different emotional weather entirely. The opening Giubiloso leaps rather than clenches; you can practically see the bow arms flying. Taylor lets that energy dissipate, gradually and unforced, into a Romanza of real tenderness and then an Andante where inner voices are given room to breathe rather than being subsumed into unison declamation. Here the ghost of Vagn Holmboe seems to hover, or perhaps Simpson again, in that patient unspooling of line. The Allegri String Quartet, who have lived inside British quartet repertoire for decades (one thinks of their old Robert Simpson cycle), bring exactly the sober, unfussy authority this music wants. The finale loops back to the opening’s vigor but carries the memory of everything between, a formal sleight-of-hand that never announces itself as such.

Then, the Seventh. Finished in 2009, op. 37, and, for my money, the finest thing on the disc. Twenty minutes of music that never sag, never pad themselves out. What’s remarkable isn’t the climaxes, though they land with real weight. It’s the transitions. Taylor is a master of the pivot, the moment where one mood tips into another without seam or joint. There’s a scherzo with real wit in it, slapstick even, a nod to comedians Taylor apparently admires, though I confess I couldn’t tell you which ones just from the sound of it, brushing up against a Mendelssohnian lightness of texture without ever curdling into pastiche. That’s a narrow needle to thread. He threads it. The Salieri Quartet, the least familiar of the three ensembles here, plays with a freshness and pliancy that suggests they came to this score without preconceptions and found their way in on the music’s own terms. No small compliment.

It is unusual for a single disc of three quartets by one composer to use three different ensembles, and I wondered going in whether the effect would be one of stylistic patchwork. It isn’t. If anything the variety clarifies what’s constant in Taylor’s voice: structural clarity, a refusal of note-spinning, a sense of a composer who knows exactly how long an idea needs to live before it must yield to the next one.

The engineering throughout is warm and close without being airless. You get rosin-dust immediacy in the louder passages and enough room around the sound in the slow movements to let the harmonic language breathe. Dynamic markings register as more than instructions; you feel the difference between a pianissimo held back and one simply arrived at.

There isn’t a crowded field of rival recordings to weigh this against, which makes this disc less a matter of comparison than of introduction. Anyone who cares about the English quartet tradition after Britten, after Tippett, after Simpson, needs to hear where it has quietly, tenaciously, gotten to. Taylor deserves a far wider following than he has. This disc should be the start of one.