Mirò Quartet: Home

The Strad Issue: August 2024

Description: An all-American celebration of the concept of home

Musicians: Mirò Quartet

Works: Arlen: Over the Rainbow (arr. Ryden). Barber: String Quartet. Puts: Home. Shaw: Microfictions, vol.1. Walker: Quartet no.1 – Molto adagio

Catalogue number: PENTATONE PTC5187227

Home, sweet home? A good home is a place of warmth and comfort, of fun and space for reflection, too, and on all these counts the Mirò has made a home to welcome any receptive listener. The opening folksy chords of Kevin Puts’s suite invite us to leave our shoes by the door. In his generously detailed notes, the Mirò’s violist John Largess explain that Puts had Syrian refugees in mind, but the intensifying expression of each movement speaks for itself, culminating in a ‘dangerously fast’ finale spiced with Bartókian microtones and glissandos.

There’s an equally strong 21st-century vibe to the fusion of avant-garde techniques with tonal harmony in Caroline Shaw’s Microfictions, which distil sharply observed musical studies and meta-stories within a minute or three. Close and involving studio sound draws in the ear to point up every naturalistic detail of her Ligetian instrumental theatre, such as the slow crunch and collapse of ‘The mountains folded in among themselves’.

The Mirò has worked directly with Puts and Shaw, and its playing radiates familiarity with the music beyond the notes. The slow movement of George Walker’s First Quartet became better known as the Lyric for Strings. There would have been space on the album to present the whole work alongside Barber’s First Quartet as an instructive comparison, but doing so would have shifted the axis away from its culminating point of arrival – an inwardly focused account of Barber’s Adagio, without a trace of applied pathos.

PETER QUANTRILL