Andrew Downes - String Quartet no 1

String Quartet no 1

Instrumentation

String Quartet

Other Information

First performed by the Perry student quartet in May 1980 in Blakedown Church, Worcestershire. First professional performance by the Arioso Quartet at the Birmingham and Midland Institute in February 1983.  Numerous subsequent performances have included one at the Master´s Lodge of Trinity College, Cambridge, by the Thomas Quartet in February 1999. Included as part of GCE ´A´ level ensemble recitals. Individual movements have been performed in the Adrian Boult Hall and Crescent Theatre, Birmingham, by the Central England Ensemble Quartet, as part of the 2004 and 2006 Birmingham Artsfests, and in the Eglise de la Madeleine, Paris, in February 2007, at the Coventry School of Music (April 2007) and St Georges Church Edgbaston, Birmingham in May 2007.  The work has also been played as a string orchestra piece by such ensembles as the Hagley String Orchestra directed by Joan Best, the Oldswinford Hospital School String Orchestra, directed by Anna Downes, the Mozart Orchestra directed by Gordon Heard and Volante Strings led by Angela Richey.  Volante Strings took the work on their tour of Corfu during Autumn 2006. 

´Downes has written a joyous piece ... rich in melodic invention and constructed with a closely-knit musical sensibility. His three-movement piece is music of substance with ideas which are directly and effectively worked through without padding or pretension... not for the first time the composer has drawn on jazz idioms within a classical framework. The Arioso, equally impressive in its precise treatment of the pungent rhythms, particularly in the middle movement and the exciting finale, as in its appreciation of the music’s intrinsic lyricism, brought this performance to a most satisfactory conclusion.´
THE BIRMINGHAM POST