Inscribed to his fellow composer Alan Rawsthorne on his 60th birthday, John McCabe’s String Trio (1965) is a notable achievement. Cast in three movements, it contains much striking invention (and the return of the wiry opening idea in the finale lends a further unity to proceedings), allied to an unfaltering sense of logic and rhythmic bite that make for rewarding listening. Stylistically, there are echoes of Tippett, Stravinsky and Britten (go to 1'27" in the opening Allegro con fuoco for a close allusion to the start of the latter’s First Quartet), but the 26-year-old composer already displays a comprehensive technical mastery of the medium. The pleasures continue with McCabe’s Second Quartet of 1972. Premièred by the Delmé Quartet at the Macclesfield Festival that year, its single movement embraces a more or less traditional classical scheme, with a nervy Vivo scherzo preceding a Largo slow movement that acts as the work’s emotional core. Again, McCabe’s music possesses a purpose, power and craft that cannot fail to impress (nor did they in the Vanbrugh Quartet’s inspirational accounts of his Third, Fourth and Fifth Quartets on Hyperion, 7/99).

Six years McCabe’s senior and a fellow Merseysider, David Ellis (b1933) was still a student at the Royal Manchester College of Music when he wrote his Trio for violin, viola and cello in 1954, a five-movement work of abundant skill and fertility. Commissioned for the 1980 Cardiff Festival, Ellis’s First String Quartet falls rather less astringently on the ear, its tautly integrated four-movement layout always underpinned by a satisfying rigour.

These are sympathetic and polished performances from members of the Manchester-based Camerata Ensemble, whose efforts have been cleanly, if rather closely recorded. A valuable anthology, well worth hunting down.

-- Andrew Achenbach, Gramophone [9/2003]