this music has divided opinion rather more sharply than perhaps the composer would have wished…I have found listening to these ten quartets an absorbing experience, at the  of which I can only suggest that listeners explore them for themselves The performances by the musicians for whom they were written and coached by the composer, are exemplary… © 2012 International Record Review

Cast in six movements and dedicated to Mancunian mathematician and politician Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw, the Nonth in Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s cycle of 10 Naxos Quartets [Nos 1 & 2 - 8.557396, Nos 3 & 4 - 8.557397, Nos 5 & 6 - 8.557398, Nos 7 & 8 - 8.557399] is a 36-minute canvas of formidable rigour and accomplishment, positively Beethovenian in its fearless ambition, questing spirit and unremitting concentration. The first two movements—a pugnacious Allegro and no less absorbing Largo flessibile—grow from the same seed and incorporate some frequently violent contrasts that hark back to childhood memories of war. The composer writes in the booklet of “the popular music of the 1940s, whose contours and rhythms are echoed, as are also the raw sounds of wartime Manchester that I heard as a small boy and associated with that music—air-raid sirens, the ‘glissandi’ of falling bombs, the tearing apart of crashing buildings—but all reinterpreted, sublimated and disciplined within terms of the string quartet”. Next come three shorter movements with a strongly burlesque flavor (“almost an independent miniature quartet within a quartet”) followed by a taut and driven finale.

Taking its cue from the Baroque suite but employing Scottish dance forms, the Tenth wears a more reflective demeanour, its emotional kernel comprising a central Adagio flessibile, which boasts some of the most probingly sincere inspiration in the whole series. The fifth anf final movement suddenly stops in mid-air—a deliberately inconclusive gesture. “I needed to leave the door open,” explains the composer. “I had enjoyed writing the Naxos Quartets so much, and perhaps even learned a thing or two, that more could, in theory, eventually flourish.”

The Maggini perform with the no-holds-barred commitment and jaw-dropping technical acumen we have come to expect from them throughout this massive project. Splendidly rich sound and a most truthful balance, too. Apparently, Rubbra and Jacob are next in line for the Maggini treatment—and I for one can hardly wait.