Robert Saxton: String Quartet No. 3: String Quartet: Parts

Quoting Saxton: My Fantazia for String Quartet was complete in December 1993 in response to a commission from the London International String Quartet Competition for a test piece for the 1994 competition. Funds were provided bythe John S Cohen Foundation.The title gives the clue to the nature of the music: the viol fantasia was the chosen form of composition for the greatest English composers of the mid-seventeenth century Lawes Jenkins Ferraboscoin particular. They inherited the techniques of vocal polyphony from Byrd and Gibbons and forged a new instrumental polyphonic style. The culmination of this genre was reached in the magnificent works of Henry Purcell around1680 and it was Purcell who adopted the spelling ‘Fantazia’.I have always loved this music and when asked to write a short piece for strings I decided to pay tribute to this under-rated tradition. Most fantazias consistedof short joined sections and I have expanded this to create and eight-minute piece in three larger sections the essence being contrapuntal interplay and equality of part-writing. (Any idea of stylistic reference would be absurdion the late twentieth century). The first section is a lyrical allegro moderato which leads into a sustained and intense slow movement; this in turn gives way to a final quick section of a dancing character a featurefrequently encountered in Purcell’s own consort pieces.

Songs Dances and Ellipses was commissioned by the Barbican Centre for the Chilingirian String Quartet on the occasion of their 25th anniversary.Quoting Saxton: 'The title Songs Dances and Ellipses refers both to the characterand the architecture of my quartet. The fundamental nature of the relationship between the extra-human music of the spheres and human musical expression manifest in song and dance lies behind much of my music; in the case ofSongs Dances and Ellipses I was absorbed by the idea of the most humanly intimate medium - the string quartet - set in the context of the all-embracing and very real elliptical orbits of the planets. The music consists of fivelinked movements which form three larger sections. Movements one and two form the first part the central slow movement is the second part and movements four and five form the third and final section.

Praeludium On The Name George Frideric Handel was commissioned by the Royal Society of Musicians of Great Britain (of which Handel was a founder member in 1738) and first performed by the Navarra String Quartet as part of the RSM?s Jacqueline du Pré Charity Concert at London?s Wigmore Hall on 3rd March 2015.