On 10 September the Adelphi Quartet premiere Tom Coult’s String Quartet No.2 as part of the 2024 Lucerne Festival. The 17-minute work was commissioned by the Adelphi Quartet, funded with the assistance of Neustart Kultur.
The quartet draws inspiration from the nineteenth-century German pedagogue Friedrich Fröbel, with each of its four movements reflecting one of his ‘Gifts’: wooden educational toys for young children, whose simple shapes (cubes, triangles, balls on string) could be combined in hundreds of ways, to which Fröbel gave evocative names.
Movement one, The First Gift (‘He sinks deep’) sees the quartet breathing as one – moving chords, scales and sharper contributions across the musical canvas. A chaotic dance follows in The Second Gift (‘To swing, swing, swing’), which then turns into a lounge jazz-inflected Sarabande. It segues directly into The Third Gift (‘Quite still, quite still’), whose music is rich and dark, with the two violins sometimes glistening as a pair; the earlier Sarabande makes a reappearance. It concludes with Fourth Gift (‘Forms of stars’), in which the first violin plucks a vaudeville number over a static, lustrous bed of sound. It was featured as one of The Strad’s notable premieres this festival season, alongside works by Coll and Hillborg.
Coult’s first String Quartet was premiered in 2018 by the Arditti Quartet at the Purcell Room. The distinctive sound of the 12-minute piece, cast in five movements, comes from the unusual tunings employed – the second violin has all its strings tuned down a semitone, and the viola is likewise tuned down a whole tone. This greatly expands the number of different pitches that can be played as open strings, and the quartet is an exploration of this distinctive timbre. The quartet was later taken up by Quatuor Diotima at Festival Présences and was recently performed in June 2024 by Jonathan Morton, Clio Gould, Oliver Wilson, and Clare O’Connell in Berkhamsted as part of the Behind the Mirror concert series.