Maggini Quartet
Laurence Jackson (violin 1) 1 ,Lorraine McAslan (violin 1) 2 , David Angel (violin 2), Martin Outram (viola), Michal Kaznowski (cello)

Peter Maxwell Davies is universally acknowledged as one of the foremost composers of our time, and is currently Master of the Queen’s Music. His musical idiom has been described by The New York Times as a combination of ‘medieval mysticism, modernist rigour and happy accessibility’.

This fifth and final instalment of Maxwell Davies’s 10-quartet cycle commissioned by Naxos opens with Quartet No. 9, dedicated to Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw, mathematician extraordinary, and sometime Lord Mayor of Manchester, both of which attributes have influenced the content of the work.

The composer has written of Quartet No. 10, ‘in no way must this be a last quartet. I needed to leave the door open: I had enjoyed writing the Naxos Quartets so much, and perhaps even learned a thing or two, that more could, in theory, eventually flourish’.

“Volume three in Maxwell Davies’s cycle of 10 quartets finds the Maggini Quartet playing with such nerve-shredding intensity one dare hardly breathe.” Classic FM on 8.557398

“Little did we know, when Max was commissioned by budget label Naxos to write 10 string quartets, what a late flowering odyssey it would be, all his mature skills coalescing within the intense discipline of
Haydn-esque form.” The Financial Times