String Quartet

Judith Weir - who studied composition privately with John Tavener, with Robin Holloway at Cambridge and with Gunther Schuller at Tanglewood - was known as a composer of rare skill and individuality even before the BBC commissioned A Night at the Chinese Opera for Kent Opera. But the first performance of that brilliantly witty work at the Cheltenham Festival in 1987 was so effective in accelerating her reputation that two major operatic commissions, for The Vanishing Bridegroom from Scottish Opera and Blond Eckbert from English National Opera, followed in its wake. She has always favoured dramatic or vocal music and even her purely orchestral or instrumental pieces, often equipped with intriguingly suggestive titles, tend to have some kind of poetic inspiration. Her so-far solitary String Quartet, which illustrates her rejection of avant-garde techniques in favour of an idiom derived from a variety of folk-song (mainly but not exclusively Scottish) sources, is about as abstract as she gets.

Written for the Endellion Quartet in 1990, the String Quartet consists of three short movements played together without a break. “Each of the movements,” Weir explains, “is based on song fragments which I had previously composed, giving the work a relatively lyrical character throughout. The songs of the first two movements were settings of medieval Spanish romances; the third is inspired by a ballad from Banffshire, Scotland.”