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The music world will celebrate Jonathan Harvey's 70th birthday on 3rd May 2009. Born in Warwickshire in 1939, Jonathan Harvey was a chorister at St Michael's College,Tenbury and later a major music scholar at St John's College, Cambridge. He gained doctorates from the universities of Glasgow and Cambridge and (on the advice of Benjamin Britten) also studied privately with Erwin Stein and Hans Keller. An invitation from Boulez to work at IRCAM in the early 1980s has so far resulted in eight realisations at the Institute and two for the Ensemble Intercontemporain. Harvey has also composed for most other genres: orchestra, chamber, as well as works for solo instruments, and many widely-performed unaccompanied works for choir, as well as three operas. Harvey is now in constant demand from a host of international organisations, attracting commissions far into the future and his music is extensively played and toured by the major ensembles of our time. Some 150-200 performances are given or broadcast each year and about 80 recordings of his music are available on CD. He was awarded the prestigious Britten Award for composition in 1993.
"The world's pre-eminent contemporary music quartet." The Guardian April 2005
"The Arditti Quartet were spellbinding." The Times July 2008
Jonathan Harvey: String Quartet No. 1
String Quartet No. 1
Jonathan Harvey: String Quartet No. 2
String Quartet No. 2
Jonathan Harvey: String Quartet No. 3
String Quartet No. 3
Jonathan Harvey: String Trio
String Trio
Jonathan Harvey: String Quartet No. 4 (with Live Electronics)
String Quartet No. 4 (with Live Electronics)
*****/*****
“The Arditti Quartet’s committed and refined playing is as superlative as ever, reflecting their long association with Harvey’s music… While the SACD sound is wonderful in the earlier quartets, in the fourth it provides a sensational aural tour de force.”
February 2010
“…Harvey's enduring relationship with the Ardittis is an exemplar for how mutual understanding can reach across the composer / performer divide. …the most cohesive and stretching cycle of British quartets since Tippett's.”
24th April 2009
****
“When Harvey employs the hardware in the Fourth, his music literally gains another dimension, as the sounds are spatialised around the listener and, using software designed at Ircam in Paris, can create another grammar of movement in space alongside his manipulation of harmony, rhythm and timbre. The Fourth Quartet is a remarkable achievement, and Harvey's journey towards it is mapped very clearly on these discs.”
****
“The Arditti are surely the perfect interpreters of Jonathan Harvey's chamber works, unfussily accommodating the requirements of a composer whose directions involve playing certain sections in masculine or feminine personalities, and noting "hot" and "cold" chord distinctions.”
17th April 2009
“surely the perfect interpreters”
“exceptional performances from the Arditti Quartet on this spellbinding double-disc set. The quartet players are on superb form throughout, and what’s really impressive is their engagement with the questing spirit
of the music, and the diversity of its mystical message. Irvine Arditti in particular often astonishes with his clarity and precision in the demanding first violin lines. Thoroughly recommended.”
String Quartet No. 1
