Alwyn: Quartets 10-13 CD review – intriguing works of a prolific perfectionist

Only a composer so prolific and yet so perfectionist as William Alwyn could have completed over a dozen string quartets of this quality and then rejected them. These four works date from more than a decade before his official published No 1; two were premiered in 1936 by the informatively titled Birmingham Ladies’ String Quartet, while the others had to wait until after his death. All are here recorded for the first time. The Quartet No 12 is the audibly experimental work of the four: a single-movement Fantasia in which Alwyn gives fierce, intense treatment to a striving yet falling motif. No 13 is a return to what seems his more comfortable style, one rooted in the folk-inspired British tradition but with intriguing ambitions beyond that, with characteristically driving rhythmic patterns that sometimes remind one of Janacek in their angular urgency. The Tippett Quartet give warm, muscular performances.