Reviews of Dutton CD of John Pickard’s Quartets 2 -4
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BBC Music Magazine September 2002
PICKARD
String Quartets Nos. 2-4
Sorrel Quartet
Dutton Epoch CDLX 7117
66:21 mins

"What other contemporary composer would state with pride that his string quartets 'deliberately avoid unconventional playing techniques: tremolandi. artificial harmonics, use of the mute - even pizzicati - all are rigorously excluded!' If that attitude seems positively puritanical, it's the positive that needs stressing: over the past decade or so, John Pickard has emerged as one of the most substantial (ie his music is all substance, with no mere effect) among British composers working today. Although his teachers included William Mathias and Louis Andriessen, Robert Simpson seems to have been a decisive inspiration for Pickard's powerful urge to organic growth and mastery of dynamic motion. With Simpson he shares the ability to move from stillness to furious activity, and back again, clearly demonstrated in the one movement Second Quartet (three sections all over the same basic pulse). The three-movement Third (1994) contrasts an opening Con Fuoco with a sombre central movement, harmonising these extremes in a valedictory, deeply moving elegiac finale. The Fourth (1997 -8) casts its net wider, with elements of Baroque stylisation but a thoroughly contemporary sensibility. Altogether this is magnificent quartet writing and makes an excellent
vehicle for one of the finest young British quartets: in fact the four witty 'concerti' that form No. 4's central movement are 'impudent character sketches' of the individuals that make up the Sorrel. Enthusiastically recommended: the British quartet tradition is alive and very well in
these works."

Calum MacDonald

GRAMOPHONE August 2002

PICKARD
String Quartets - No 2; No 3; No 4
Sorrel Quartet
(Gina McCormack, Catherine Yates vns, Sarah-Jane Bradley va, Helen Thatcher vc)
Dutton Epoch CDLX7117 (66 minutes: DDD)
Substantial new additions to the quartet repertoire, sensitively brought to life

"My 'Take Five' feature last December speculated in passing on the 'symphonic' nature of several major string quartet composers from last century. As his gripping Piano Sonata (Athene, 9/98) suggested, John Pickard (b 1963) is grounded in this line of thinking - and his understanding of large-scale form is heard to the full in the quartets featured on the present disc.
As the composer points out in his informative booklet note, the Second Quartet (1993) is on one level a reaction against the formal complexities of its predecessor (1991, also in one movement). Yet there's nothing flaccid about the warmly ruminative opening (think of the first movement of Shostakovich's Ninth Quartet), or the emotive viola soliloquy that builds intently to a vibrant and affirmative ending. The Third Quartet (1994) pursues an unusual but convincing trajectory: a vehement Con fuoco leading into a powerfully sustained Molto intensivo, followed by an equivocal yet cathartic Con moto - the accumulated tension sublimated rather than released. The Fourth Quartet (1998) is an intriguing take on Baroque procedures from a present-day perspective. After a 'Sinfonia' of Beethovenian density and impact, a Bartokian sequence of 'Concerti' for each instrument allows for the judicious employment of a wide range of playing techniques; then the 'Fantasia of Four Parts' accelerates between the extremes of stasis and dynamism with an inevitability recalling Robert Simpson in approach if not in idiom - which is demonstrably and persuasively Pickard's.
The Sorrel Quartet realise all three works with the same sensitivity of spirit and unanimity of response that has made their Shostakovich quartets for Chandos the pick of several still continuing cycles. Spacious yet well-defined sound from The Maltings, Snape acoustic, and a timely release that no one at all concerned with coherence and renewal in contemporary music can afford to ignore."

Richard Whitehouse

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