Even at its biggest and boldest, Mark-Anthony Turnage’s music has always contained a thread of dark lyricism. Intimacy and tenderness of expression are never absent for long in Turnage’s music, and are essential to his large output of works for chamber ensemble – his mature string quartets in particular.
The two works presented so compellingly here by the Piatti Quartet, whose deep familiarity with Turnage’s music is informed by regular collaboration with the composer since 2015, are products of the composer’s late fifties. Drawing on the ability of the quartet genre to absorb and reimagine both elevated and vernacular musical idioms, they are deeply personal statements – at times shockingly so in their intensity and insights into a world of private emotions.
