Intricate Web Fitzwilliam String Quartet

• Liz Johnson (1964):
• 1 String Quartet No. 3 "Intricate Web" 10:11
• 2 Reflections of an Eccentric English Artist: Pt. 1, — 10:11
• 3 Towards the Sea 07:39
• 4 Cabbage Dreams 06:54
• 5 String Quartet No. 1 "Images of Trees": I. Clefts & Fissures of Bark 04:53
• 6 String Quartet No. 1 "Images of Trees": II. Winter Branches 04:02
• 7 String Quartet No. 1 "Images of Trees": III. Leaf 04:56
• 8 Sleep Close 05:58
• 9 Tide Purl 04:09
• 10 Reflections of an Eccentric English Artist: Pt. 2, — 08:23
• 11 Watching Medusa 05:50
• 12 Forty-something 04:28
• 13 Sea-change 28:16
• 14 String Quartet No. 2 "For Elliott": Pt. 1, — 03:10
• 15 String Quartet No. 2 "For Elliott": Pt. 2, — 01:56
• 16 String Quartet No. 2 "For Elliott": Pt. 3, — 04:36
• 17 Elephant Woman 02:23
• 18 Pig 02:03
• 19 Reflections of an Eccentric English Artist: Pt. 3, — 09:28
• 20 String Quartet No. 4 "Sky-burial" 27:17
• Total Runtime 02:36:43

Info for Intricate Web

Liz Johnson is a British composer with a very special gift and distinctive style, definitely in the avant-garde mold yet not totally alien to traditional-music lovers. Intricate Web is not only the title of one of the quartets here (there are four numbered String Quartets and two other works for the quartet) but also accurately describes her compositional technique which is complex and detailed, requiring top class performers. It may also describe the way in which the pieces here have been assembled, splitting cello solos and vocal pieces between the quartets to create a web of fascinating sounds and textures. The Fitzwilliam String Quartet is undoubtedly one of todays most celebrated ensembles with a fine reputation in the world of new music. Cellist Heather Tuach plays solo in the breathtaking Cello Suite. Soprano Loré Lixenberg deals with the immense difficulty of the writing in the Jo Shapcott Settings and Ronald Woodley provides a magical performance on several clarinets. In all, a superb introduction to a major composer deserving wide recognition. Over 157 minutes of music!

Fitzwilliam String Quartet

The Fitzwilliam String Quartet
is now one of the longest-established string quartets in the world. Founded in Michaelmas Term 1968 by four Cambridge undergraduates, the quartet achieved international recognition from the very outset, as a result of its members’ personal friendship with Dmitri Shostakovich towards the end of his life and their championing of his string quartets following his death in 1975. He had entrusted them with the Western premieres of the last three, and before long they had become the first ever group to perform and record all fifteen quartets. Those discs, which won many international awards, secured the Fitzwilliam a worldwide concert schedule and a long-term contract with Decca/London, by which they explored some byways of the late Romantic repertoire (including Franck, Delius, Borodin and Sibelius) before embarking on a Beethoven cycle. The Shostakovich set was included in Gramophone’s ‘Hundred Greatest-Ever Recordings’ in November 2005. All these recordings are newly available on Universal’s London or Eloquence labels.

Generous private patronage has made possible the Fitzwilliam’s current collaboration with Linn, which began in 2000 with Haydn’s Seven Last Words and has continued with Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet (with Lesley Schatzberger) and an album of twentieth-century English song with James Gilchrist and Anna Tilbrook (this includes Vaughan Williams’s On Wenlock Edge and was a finalist in the 2009 Gramophone Awards). Further releases have appeared on Divine Art Records, beginning with the complete quartets of the eminent geologist John Ramsay, the latest of these a jazz-fusion collaboration with the German saxophonist-composer Uwe Steinmetz and former Turtle Island Quartet violinist Mads Tolling.

The Fitzwilliam remain one of the few prominent quartets to play on older set-ups, yet at the same time they have helped bring over 50 new works into the repertoire. They have maintained their pre-eminence as interpreters of Shostakovich, and also put the authority thus gained at the service of a range of other composers, from the late seventeenth century to the present day.

From Vaughan Williams in 2008 and Delius and Grainger to the Britten centenary in 2013, the players have enthusiastically used anniversaries to promote less familiar music: in 2015 they look further north, to mark the joint 150th birthdays of Glazunov, Sibelius and Nielsen.

Travels since the millennium have included four visits to Russia, which took in the St Petersburg Conservatoire, Pushkin’s House, the Sheremetev Palace, the Summer Palace at Peterhof and the former home of Modest and Pyotr Tchaikovsky. For most of their career they have been making regular trips to the USA, two of which included marathon three-hour events in the late Lorin Maazel’s private concert hall on his farm in Virginia. In 2008, their first journey to the snows of Newfoundland was followed by a Martin Randall Travel archaeological cruise from Athens to Istanbul that featured performances in a number of ancient amphitheatres en route. Further ventures abroad have taken the Fitzwilliam back to Italy, North America and South Africa (where they performed in Cape Town and Pretoria and made a recording of music by the Western Cape composer Michael Blake); they have since made their debuts in Luxembourg and Israel. At the beginning of 2013 they performed three movements of Britten’s String Quartet No. 3 for John Bridcut’s BBC4 film Britten’s Endgame; three weeks later they received a Delius Society award for services to the composer in his 150th anniversary year. Their continuing work on Beethoven has included a collaboration with Prof. Nancy November (University of Auckland, New Zealand) on a new edition of the string quartets for Henle. In July 2014 they embarked on a project to record English anthems with St Salvator’s Chapel Choir (University of St Andrews, Scotland).

After twelve years as quartet in residence at York University and three at Warwick, their university work continues at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, Bucknell University, Pennsylvania, and latterly at St Andrews, where they run an annual quartet course called Strings in Spring alongside their regular coaching weekend for Benslow Music in Hertfordshire.

Booklet for Intricate Web