Quartets: One–Four

The Scottish composer/cellist Peter Gregson has written film and ballet scores, reworked Bach’s Cello Suites for a new generation and is generally regarded as a renaissance man of the classical music industry. Yet of all the work he has created, Gregson’s new album, Quartets: One – Four, is, he says, his “most personal project” yet. Conceived in 2016 “as a break from back-to-back film and game scores”, this sequence of four works for a typical string quartet of two violins, viola and cello came from a very private place in Gregson’s musical imagination. “I wanted to carve out some space to write music for myself with no brief, no deadline, no rules,” he tells Apple Music. And while the instruments used on the album are traditional, Gregson’s treatment of the string quartet format—a “deliciously expressive medium,” he calls it—boldly flouts established conventions. In Quartets: Two, he uses synthesisers “to add propulsion and depth” to the basic quartet sound. Quartets: Three goes even further, with the electronics “baked in, much more subtle,” says Gregson. Even in the all-acoustic Quartets: One and Quartets: Four, he is constantly exploring new shapes and sonic combinations. Tweaking the listener’s ear with novelty is, however, absolutely not what Gregson is bent on achieving. “The electronics I chose for this body of work—the reverbs, delays, harmonisers, synthesisers, tapes—were all physically present and being recorded just as carefully as the quartet themselves, all being committed to tape at the same time,” he says. “I wanted to explore the idea of ‘natural electronics’, a breathing sonic landscape where the natural warmth of the string quartet and the potentially cold world of electronics can coexist. And because we recorded it all in Spatial Audio, you really are hearing this music from inside the quartet, which makes it all sound as if we’re performing the music just for you.”