Maxwell Quartet with Cordelia Williams

A beautiful blend of piano and strings, combining classical and folk traditions.

This special collaboration between the Maxwells and Cordelia Williams integrates music from and inspired by the quartet’s Scottish homeland with iconic classical music works. Alongside traditional folk music is Maxwell Davies’ work, written as a protest against a proposed uranium mine on the remote Orkney Islands where the composer lived, and featuring beautifully simple melodies. Arvo Part’s masterpiece ‘Fratres’ is a series of variations on a similarly simple stepwise theme, creating a meditative effect. With Schumann’s work, dedicated to his wife Clara, the composer effectively ‘invented’ the piano quintet, a combination of instruments never written for before.