Pre-Order: London Chamber Ensemble Quartet - Charles Wood: Str Quartets Vol. 2 [CD]

SOMM Recordings is proud to continue it's widely praised collaboration with the London Chamber Ensemble Quartet, which was founded by violinist Madeleine Mitchell in 1992 at the request of the Vale of Glamorgan Festival. In 2024, the group released Howells & Wood: String Quartets [SOMMCD 0692], which was one of Gramophone's recommended recordings of 2024 and was praised by MusicWeb International as a valuable and illuminating recording.This warm reception led to SOMM's invitation for the LCE Quartet to record all eight of the quartets by Charles Wood (1866 - 1926). The first volume, Charles Wood: String Quartets [SOMMCD 0723], was selected as album of the week on BBC Radio Ulster as well as being featured on BBC Radio 3's In Tune. Charles Wood String Quartets Vol 2 completes the set with the First, Third, and Fifth quartets, and a fragment of what would have been his Eighth quartet. When the Irish-born Charles Wood auditioned for the Morley Scholarship in Composition at the newly inaugurated Royal College of Music, he included movements of a String Quartet in A minor in his submission. After entering RCM in April 1883 and beginning his studies with Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, he sought to finish this early quartet, but what emerged two years later was his String Quartet No. 1 in D minor, heard here in a first recording. It was performed at an RCM concert on 15 July 1885, praised by the eminent violinist Joseph Joachim for it's fluency, and described by Stanford as having poetry in it.This release opens with Charles Wood's String Quartet No. 3 in A minor, first performed on 16 February 1912 and becoming the most frequently performed quartet during Wood's lifetime and after his death. It was also, for many years, the only one of his quartets to be recorded. The finale is notable for it's use of the Irish folk song The Lark in the Clear Air, anticipating further Irish expeditions in his later quartets.The finale of the String Quartet No. 5 in F, which received it's first performance on 7 March 1916, is based on the Irish tune, The Devil of Dublin, which Wood treats as a double jig. Wood indicated in his score that the two violins should be considered as entirely equal voices throughout, a feature which adds significantly to the already intense polyphonic nature of the piece.The LCE Quartet ends their cycle of all eight of the quartets by Charles Wood with a fragment from a Quartet in G minor, most likely written between 1916 and 1917. An incomplete second movement that survives in the Wood Archive suggests that he had, at some point, contemplated an entire work around this key.