Sorrel Quartet

“exceptionally searching readings...These are dedicated performances which understandingly bring out the contrast between the expansive Quintet, bold in rhetoric, and the more intimate Quartet, with its terse, economicaly structure.” Penguin Guide, 2011 edition

“The Sorrel Quartet can claim a significant 'first' in its account of the recently resurrected F major Quartet from 1928. At 15 Britten was nothing if not precocious, and although the ideas in this substantial piece offer few hints of his mature style, he was already using the medium to excellent effect. Three years later, in the D major Quartet which has been a repertory item since Britten revised it in 1974, there are signs of a more individual voice; this is an attractive performance, well shaped and effectively characterised.
Nevertheless, it's on the interpretation of the Quartet No 2 that the disc must be judged. The Sorrel's naturalness and feeling for line are much in evidence. Tempos for the first movement are broader than most rivals, but they serve an approach which makes a virtue of reticence, and still manages to be quite gripping.
It has just about the best sound currently available (with The Maltings, Snape, providing an ideal acoustic), and the otherwise unrecorded F major Quartet adds strength to the recommendation of this noteworthy disc.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010

“…in the Piano Quintet. Martin Roscoe and the Sorrels offer a dynamic and intense performance with Roscoe bringing marvellous shape and colour to the piano part.” BBC Music Magazine, September 2005 ****

“Volume 6 of the Sorrel Quartet's Shostakovich series gives us two of his outwardly formulaic works framing one of his most audacious, the Twelfth Quartet. It's a rather peculiar programme, not that this need bother anyone collecting this particular intégrale.
The playing is as idiomatic as you might expect from an ensemble once coached by Rostislav Dubinsky, founder member and first leader of the Borodin Quartet. True, the almost casual opening of the First Quartet is not ideally euphonious and, in the first movement of the Twelfth, there's a momentary lapse of concentration from the viola, whose expressive swoops elsewhere may not be to all tastes. What matters more is the palpable, very human sense of engagement, something you don't always get from glitzier groups.
Given that the best recordings of the Piano Quintet are 20 years old and either tucked away or buried altogether, the present account is not unwelcome, though it is relatively small-scale.
It's the subtle intimacy of the final pay-off one remembers, the warmth of the Maltings acoustic masking any thinness of tone.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010