Hearth

Hearth is a festive album, but does much more than trot out familiar holiday tunes to be played in the background. Instead, the Texas-based Miró Quartet asked 15 contemporary composers to set a favourite seasonal melody “in any way that would work for string quartet”, with fascinatingly diverse results. “Bringing this many different composers together on a single project was a big challenge,” Miró Quartet tells Apple Music Classical. “To write short pieces in such a short time, with such a specific goal of expressing themselves and their own holiday memories, was actually quite a challenge for our composers. They really had to sit and think deeply and draw on their authentic childhood selves and then imagine how that could work in the string quartet medium.” Karl Mitze has responded to the Mirós’ brief with “Deck the Halls”, energised by hyperactive violin rhythms, with the cello elegantly holding the vocal line on top. “This is for us, in many ways, the iconic track on the album. Austin, Texas has been our home for over 20 years, and Will our violinist has been a professional country fiddler since he was a child. So this genre is part of his DNA.” Sam Lipman, by contrast, looks inward in the traditional Hanukkah song “Ma’oz Tzur” (“Rock of Ages”), a vein of introspection shared by both the melancholy refractions of Gabriel Kahane’s “Halfspent, ‘lo, how a rose…’” and Anna Clyne’s “Mothers Lullaby”, a haunted re-imagining of the “Coventry Carol”. Glimmering pizzicatos frame Michi Wiancko’s jaunty take on “Jingle Bells”, while in “Songs of Christmas Past” Hyung-ki Joo packs in snatches of over 20 seasonal ditties in a virtuoso drive-by. “Our hope for this project has been that we’d get a rainbow of musical view points about what holiday music can mean to each of us,” says the quartet. It’s a dream that has clearly been beautifully realised, and the quartet’s outstandingly alert and expressive playing adds to a highly original and memorable festive album.