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String Quartet No 9
Sonata for Violin Solo;
Lyric Suite for Piano Trio

Kreutzer String Quartet Peter Sheppard Skærved & Mihailo Trandafilovski, violins, coMorgan Goff, viola Neil Heyde, cello
& Roderick Chadwick Piano

Naxos American Classics 8.559666 [recorded 2008/9]

This latest release in an important series has a new line-up for the Kreutzer Quartet. They give a stunning account of Coates' very difficult ninth quartet about which the booklet notes by Kyle Gann and Peter Sheppard Skærved are comprehensive and illuminating.

The quartet's structure is described in detail; the first movement is 'a canon and almost-palindrome. - - At 5 mins 54 secs all four instruments begin glissandoing across a range of several octaves, the violins downward from the stratosphere, the cello and viola upwards from their low Cs. At the opposite extremes of their registers they all reverse direction, and the first half of the movement repeats itself backwards, the canon starting in the first violin and working its way down to the cello.'Gloria Coates herself tells me that "the entire movement is a mirror canon! You can play it backwards and it equals forwards... ".

The solo sonata and piano trio broaden the perspective of Gloria Coates' chamber music. It all sounds to be very well played and the disc is recommended strongly to collectors who want not to miss a unique compositional voice.

Peter Grahame Woolf

See also GloriaCoatesSymphonies
and review by Massimo Ricci [Editor]