Romantic: String Quartet: Score and Parts

The principal post-Romantic Danish composer Carl Nielsen was born in 1865 the son of a painter and village musician. Childhood experience as an amateur performer led to subsidised study at the Copenhagen Conservatory and a long career during which he developed his own personal style of composition in particular in a series of important symphonies. This string quartet includes score and parts.

Joan Tower's Dumbarton Quintet (2008) for Piano Quintet. This work was premiered on 12 April 2008 at Dumbarton Oaks Washington DC by the Enso String Quartet with Joan Tower on thePiano. Following Stravinsky and Copland as the third commissioned composer by the Dumbarton Oaks Estate is of course quite daunting — particularly since these are two very strong composers that had an enormousinfluence on me. Their sense of musical continuity and profiling of ideas puts them in the category of musical geniuses. I have in fact dedicated two pieces to them: Petroushskates (to Stravinsky) and Fanfare for the UncommonWoman (to Copland). My musical debt to these two great composers is profound. The Dumbarton Quintet is a Piano Quintet dedicated to Susan Feder my longtime publisher at G. Schirmer and Associated MusicPublishers. (She is now with the Mellon Foundation). It was commissioned by the Dumbarton Oaks Estate. It is a 14-minute work in one movement that travels through several themes with different emotional contents.The first is a flowing line that is cast in a narrow space of smaller intervals first soft then loud but with a restrained kind of intensity that finally 'bursts out' into a more 'forward' and visceral type of intensity. Thisshifting between intensities in fact is part of the 'dna' of the work and as the piece progresses; each side tends to take on more and more extremes of expression. At particular points the 'softer' material becomes almostromantic consonant and singing in its expression whereas the 'louder' passages become the opposite — manic and aggressively dissonant. - Joan Tower

The String Quartet No.1 was composed in 1919 actually making it his fourth quartet but it was the first to be published. It is scored in five movements: Prelude- Pastorale- Scherzo- Elegy- Rondo Retrospectivo.Cyril Scott (1879-1970) was a British composer pianist and poet. His most popular works by which he is largely remembered today were written in the years preceding the Second World War however he continued to compose prolifically in the face of indifference from the outside world right up until his death at the age of 91. His music is predominantly in the Romantic style and serves as a tasteful reminder of abygone age.