SIMPSON. String Quartets—No. 7 (1977); No 8 (1978). DelmO Quartet (Galina Soiodchin,

Jeremy Williams, vins; John Underwood, via;

Stephen Orton, vie). Hyperion ® A6611 7.

Of all the composers to use the tonal system in the second half of the twentieth century, Shostakovich had an unsurpassed ability to stamp even the most apparently conventional figurations and passage work with his own distinctive personality. Like Shostakovich, Robert Simpson has a particular devotion to the string quartet, and while Simpson's music may not quite possess the instantly identifiable, consistently individual quality that marked out the Russian master even at his least inspired, it has in abundance that strong sense of purpose which is a prerequisite of a tonal idiom in what remains by and large a post-tonal era.

These two quartets are both inspired by men of science, Sir James Jeans and Professor David Gillett. It is the larger of the two works, No. 8, that is dedicated to Gillett, an entomologist and discoverer of a species of mosquito, while No. 7 (dedicated to Lady Jeans, the wife of the great astronomer) is relatively small scale. I find No. 7 the least successful of the two; the desire to evoke the stillness and emptiness of space in the slow outer sections of a single tripartite movement generates what, for Simpson, is rather neutral material, so that the skilful control of its harmonic and format framework counts for relatively little.

The larger, four-movement Eighth Quartet is not without moments of marking time either, especially in the finale. But its character, launched with a fugue of memorable melodicexpansiveness, is stronger, and the ending is a particularly fine example of a logical conclusion excitingly drawn from the uncompromising exploitation of vividly-imagined textural consistency. The Delmé Quartet are Simpson specialists, and with open, evenly-balanced recorded sound, they are eloquent advocates of music that deserves to be far better known. A. W.