Avalon String Quartet

Avalon String Quartet
Naxos 8559941 74:33 mins
Both these 20th-century composers spent much of their time in Chicago, but they lived very different American lives. Leo Sowerby, born in 1895, sustained a long career as an established composer and teacher, and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1946. The mixedrace Florence Price, born eight years earlier, worked diligently against much harder odds, but achieved no comparable distinction. Today, however, Price is the one who gets bountifully performed and recorded, while Sowerby makes modest appearances here and there as a reminder of the past.
Yet it is Sowerby’s A minor String Quartet that makes the biggest impression on this album. His language is muscular and direct, just like his English tempo markings: ‘languidly, darkly’, ‘very fast’. The latter describes the second movement, as relentlessly and deliciously syncopated as any of Tippett’s early works for strings. Sowerby can equally be expansively lyrical. Passionate advocates, the Avalon players excel at any speed, though they can do little to repair the work’s one flaw: lopsided architecture, with a meatier finale definitely required.
Price’s music often manifests its own structural quirks, but her String Quartet No. 2 of 1935 is particularly cogent, with turbulent chromatic passages neatly balanced by soulful melodies always enhanced by the Avalon Quartet’s warm, rounded tones. Textures and melodies come equally meshed in 1951’s Five Folksongs in Counterpoint, reaching their peak in a spirited and extended treatment of ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’. All told, this is an excellent release.

Geoff Brown PERFORMANCE
RECORDING

April 2024