condition (record/cover): NM / EX- (1" light sticker removal damege on front)

The document of Brian Ferneyhough's string quartet writing in the early years of what would become one of the most extensive and important bodies of chamber music by any composer of his generation. The Sonatas for String Quartet had established, in their original form, a compositional approach so demanding of performer and listener alike that the string quartet medium - already the most burdened by historical expectation - was effectively remade around new assumptions about what it could sustain and what it could mean. The Arditti Quartet, whose relationship with Ferneyhough's music was already, by this recording, one of the defining partnerships in contemporary chamber music, bring to these works the combination of technical command and genuine interpretive intelligence that the music requires and cannot function without.

Two copies of this RCA Red Seal LP are available - a document of Ferneyhough's uncompromising development of the New Complexity, at a moment before that term had been coined and before the full implications of his approach had been absorbed. RCA Red Seal, RL 25141.