The Smith Quartet primarily focuses on contemporary repertoire, and in this collection targets works with themes of death by five British composers. Tim Souster's nightmarish Hambledon Hill, which includes live electronics, uses sampled string sounds to amplify and elaborate on the creepy glissandi, shrieks, and yawps a string quartet is capable of producing. It succeeds marvelously as an atmospheric evocation of a mortuary found in the remains of a Neolithic English hill fort. The Old Woman of Beare by Michael Alcorn also uses live electronics, as well as a speaker reciting a translation of an astonishingly modern-sounding ninth century Irish poem, in which a women laments her lost youth and imminent death. Alcorn's electronic sounds are generated by the voice and strings, and with the despairing text, create a mood of fearsome desolation. Gavin Bryars wrote an abbreviated version of The Sinking of the Titanic for the Smith Quartet and electronics. Unlike the previous pieces on the album, Bryars uses a wider range of sampled sounds to capture the immensity of the ship's sinking, including interviews with survivors. Although this version, at less than 15 minutes, fails to generate the overwhelming emotional charge of the complete version, it's still potently evocative on its own terms. James MacMillan's piece is the only one on the CD to use only the quartet itself. His piece and Stephen Montague's are written as memorials to friends and are melancholy, atmospheric tributes, although Montague's quartet (the most substantial and impressive piece on the disc) develops into an agitated and engagingly kinetic tour de force. The selections make an attractive album of repertoire from off the beaten path that's predominantly dark, but still colorful, and the Smith Quartet performs the dauntingly difficult pieces with panache and technical assurance.
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