University of York Music Press

The String Quartet was programmed between Béla Bartók's Fourth String Quartet and Alban Berg's Lyric Suite. Jouanny speaks of the Ligeti Quartet's 'verve and brilliance' and compares Nicholson's music to Bartók's in its concern with maintaining a sense of line, alongside more gestural textures. He writes:

I found this work psychologically and structurally complex, each movement building on the last without being straightforwardly linear or sequential. My own preference was for the third movement: a dance-like scherzo which kept one guessing with its rhythmic shifts and frenetic dialogues between the instruments.

Read the full Classical Sheffield Ligeti Quartet review