Joseph Phibbs (b.1974)
String Quartet No.2 (2014)
String Quartet No.3 (2018, rev. 2021)
String Quartet No.4 (2024)
Piatti Quartet
rec. 2023/2024, London, UK
Nimbus Alliance NI6452 [56]

Joseph Phibbs is an English composer who, although featured at various festivals (I came across his music at the English Music Festival some years ago), has had little attention. There have been reviews on this site but usually the CDs in question have represented him as one of a line-up of different British composers. MWI has a most useful interview with the composer.

Phibbs, a Londoner, studied with Harrison Birtwistle and Stephen Stucky. He has an extensive list of works. It is no surprise, given the cello was his childhood instrument, that one of his ‘concertos’ is the Evian Variations for cello and orchestra (2013). Phibbs remarks that, when at the age of 14, he first heard the music of Britten (his first string quartet), “the opening of which still fills me with awe … his works – especially those for strings – have remained a lifelong inspiration”.

This disc may not be the first all-Phibbs CD but it is notably devoted exclusively to his compositions for string quartet. As it turns out his First String Quartet has been reviewed here as part of a Champs Hill collection, again performed by the Piatti Quartet who also commissioned it.

The four-movement String Quartet No. 2 buzzes with insistently tense yet wholeheartedly melodic tension. Web-like, there is a hint of Tippett, of Ravel, of insect chittering and of a profusion of bird-song. These elements all conspire to batter at the heart and the mind. At its close the music, seemingly purged of urgency, fades into a blue distance.

The Third Quartet, in five movements, was written three years after its predecessor. It is a work driven along by the far from contented conversational whispers of the quartet’s “voices”. The third movement proceeds with goaded alacrity and with a tumble of striking lyrical ideas. The fourth movement has a mystical Indian feeling somehow caught in turbulence with the Ravel Quartet. Phibbs, while quite original, evokes a constantly active negotiation between the RVW Lark Ascending and the rhapsodic side of Alan Hovhaness.

Also in five movements, the Fourth Quartet, completed in 2024, mixes turbulent restlessness with a more predominant songful element. The composer’s touchstone here, a querulous beauty, has a remote enchantment about it. A dance of the heavenly spirits casts a sideways glance at Hovhaness in his more recessed moments.

The four members of the Piatti Quartet, who have worked with Phibbs over many years, are kindred spirits, and their playing reflects this. The composer seems, in these works, to be on a quest for a sancta sanctorum. Agreeably closely recorded, the music is never overly complex, nor is it discordantly avant-garde.

If you like the music of Valentin Silvestrov, Arvo Pärt or Marjan Mozetich, be reassured: you are on a related pilgrimage with these works.

Rob Barnett

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