The Strad Recommends: Sacconi Quartet: Dove

THE STRAD RECOMMENDS

The Strad Issue: March 2025

Description: Compelling music from one of today’s most distinct composerly voices

Musicians: Sacconi Quartet, Katya Apekisheva, Charles Owen (piano) Philippe Sly (baritone)

Works: Dove: On the Streets and in the Sky; Between Friends; Who wrote the book of love; Vanishing Gold

Catalogue number: SIGNUM CLASSICS SIGCD793

It feels like only yesterday that I reviewed the premiere of On the Streets and in the Sky (February 2022), perhaps because Dove’s three-movement lockdown suite has lingered in the memory as a remarkably direct and original response to that strange time.

Who wrote… begins and ends in the same introspective vein, as a song cycle to original lyrics by the composer’s regular librettist Alasdair Middleton. Love takes many forms and reaches different destinations over the journey of the 17 poems, and Dove responds to them with a voice of rapt, dewy freshness which makes something new out of an arpeggiated bass and a G minor chord.

No less than a previous collection of chamber music from the same source, the album celebrates the long partnership between Dove and the Sacconi. If its performances sound definitive, it must at least partly be down to some exceptionally realistic, high-definition engineering on the part of Signum. However, Dove has worked with other quartets, such as the Endellion for whom he wrote Vanishing Gold, on a near-orchestral scale of texture, boiled down to an eventful five minutes.

Between Friends offers gentler pleasures, conceived both for the piano-duo partnership of Owen and Apekisheva, and as a tribute in memory of a university friend with whom Dove would play Schubert. If this is his F minor Fantasy, it says much for his spirit of invention that the comparison does not embarrass him.

PETER QUANTRILL