String Quartets 1–3
| String Quartets 1-3 | |||||
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art by Paul Richards
clockwise from top left: Balanescu, Musker, Hinnigan, Carney |
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| Studio album by Michael Nyman and Balanescu Quartet | |||||
| Released | June 14, 1991 | ||||
| Recorded | November 1990, Church Studios, Crouch End using B & W Loudspeakers | ||||
| Genre | Contemporary classical music, Chamber music, string quartet, minimalist music | ||||
| Length | 63:17 | ||||
| Label | Argo | ||||
| Producer | Andrew Cornall | ||||
| Michael Nyman chronology | |||||
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| Balanescu Quartet chronology | |||||
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| 1991 Alternative Cover | |||||
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| 2002 Decca Reissue | |||||
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String Quartets 1–3 is a 1991 album by the Balanescu Quartet (Alexander Balanescu, Jonathan Carney, Kate Musker, and Tony Hinnigan) and the fifteenth release by Michael Nyman. It is the second album of his music (after Out of the Ruins) on which he did not perform or conduct, though he does provide liner notes. String Quartet No. 3 is built out of Out of the Ruins and became a fixture in numerous Nyman film scores in the 1990s.
The album was issued by Argo Records with two different covers. Decca Records reissued the album in the UK on July 8, 2002, as part of the British Music Collection, giving it yet a third cover.
Nyman's four string quartets are the subject of chapter 7 in Pwyll ap Siôn's The Music of Michael Nyman: Texts, Contexts, and Intertexts.
The album is the first of several recordings of the Nyman string quartets. The Lyric Quartet would also record String Quartets 2 and 3, and sections of String Quartet No. 4 on String Quartets 2, 3 & 4/If & Why (2002). The Nyman Quartet (Musker and Hinnigan with violinists Gabrielle Lester and Catherine Thompson), according to the liner notes of Acts of Beauty • Exit no Exit (2006), is set to record all four some time in the future.
The album was reissued by MN Records with a new cover and liner notes in November 2012. This edition is subtitled "Chamber Music Vol. II". It is not the aforementioned rerecording.
The String Quartet No. 1 (1985) was commissioned by the Arditti Quartet. Nyman had attended a performance of Ludwig van Beethoven's Grosse Fuge by the group, and found it the most theatrical performance on a string quartet he had ever witnessed, performed as though Beethoven had been trying to break through the limitations of the string quartet to create an orchestral sound. The quartet was originally intended to be a "compendium" of string quartet literature, but he decided that two pieces from different eras were enough of a contrast. It is built out of three distinct and diverse pre-existing music sources: John Bull's Walsingham Variations, Arnold Schoenberg's String Quartet No. 2, and Alex North's "Unchained Melody". The use of Bull is an homage to his professor, Thurston Dart, who presented Nyman with the Musica Britannica edition of Bull's keyboard works as a graduation gift. "Walsingham" was a popular song in Bull's time, and Nyman's use of "Unchained Melody" (originally written for a 1955 prison film titled Unchained and famously covered by The Righteous Brothers, and the favorite song of Nyman's wife, Aet) is a contemporary equivalent. As noted by Pwyll Ap Siôn, "Unchained Melody" is musically related to "Walsingham", as its opening three-note pattern of C-D-E is a slight variation of the melody of "Walsingham". "Unchained Melody" enters in figure H (measure 274) over a bass line of variation 9 of "Walsingham" that previously appeared in figure E.
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