Edinburgh Quartet

 
Let's get our heads above the parapet today and fly a flag for Scotland. Let's raise a glass to Scottish composers, Scottish music, Scottish musicians and a remarkable Scottish recording company.

The history of the performance and championing of modern Scottish classical music is patchy. It goes not so much in peaks and troughs as flurries and dribbles. There are huge areas of neglect, some of these containing a few towering figures. But periodically there is a landmark moment. And there is one upon us, right here, right now.

If you are interested at all in contemporary Scottish culture, you should be aware of this, even if listening to any contemporary classical music is on the outer fringes of your spectrum of interest.

The facts are straightforward. There is a new CD recording of four pieces written by Scottish composers. It features as its players the longest-serving chamber music group in the country, the Edinburgh Quartet, which is Scotland's only full-time professional string quartet. It has been recorded and is published by Delphian, an enterprising young Edinburgh-based label founded and run by Paul Baxter, whose reputation in the music business grows steadily. It should take an exponential leap with this project.

Baxter has compiled and recorded a compact disc of four contemporary string quartets. Not all the composers' names will be widely familiar, though they deserve to be. They are Kenneth Dempster, James Clapperton, Judith Weir and William Sweeney. Three of the four works are recent and these are their first recordings.

In more than 25 years of professional reviewing, I have heard pretty much every significant piece of music written by Scottish or Scotland-based composers. I do not exaggerate when I say these four works, individually, are among the most important, well-crafted, purposeful, clear-headed, intellectually lucid and emotionally powerful pieces of new music it has been my good fortune to hear. And collectively, on this outstanding CD, driven by the scorchingly focused performances from the Edinburgh Quartet, the impact of the four pieces is colossal.

Dempster's 2005 quartet, his fourth, is entitled The Cold Dancer, and is immediately compelling through its savage attacks with scrunchy chords, searing melodic lines and seething textures. It's a bit Bartok-y in this respect, with huge expressive surges, all breathtakingly complemented by music of a beautiful, hymn-like simplicity.

Clapperton's 1990 quartet, The Great Divorce, is an extraordinary piece played entirely on muted strings and with the ethos of an intimate, murmured conversation overheard from afar. It has such emotional coherence that, even when the music speeds up and assumes a dance-like step, it loses none of that intimacy. And there is a devastation coup de theatre towards the end when, in the course of a heart-rending cello melody, a skittish little jig flits impertinently across the horizon.

Judith Weir's 1990 String Quartet is the best-known of the pieces. Drawn from a song, the music is lyrical throughout, with organic streams of melody. It is Scottish to its core and the roots of its soul. The glorious finale is a dazzler, with a Sibelian intensity to its racing and scurrying, shot through with the lilt and step of a Scottish folk dance.

Arguably, however, it is Sweeney's Third String Quartet, from 2004, that has the word masterpiece stamped all over it. It is a monster of a piece lasting 36 minutes. It's totally abstract, and some might think it discontinuous, with its apparently fractured progression, pounding rhythmic unisons that dissolve, seemingly isolated and unrelated musical events, wild dances, and melancholic intensity. With a little familiarity, the events begin to cohere, and what emerges is a kaleidoscopic piece of a rare conciseness and almost Beethovenian intensity.

Each of the composers is at his and her peak of form in their pieces, and the Edinburgh Quartet has never played better. It's nothing less than a landmark.