I heard one piece from this in the radio, and Record Review gave the impression it was by way of exploring the origins of the string quartet, you can never go wrong with Haydn but also I liked the title.
You won't really come away from it with a greater idea of the origins of the string quartet, it's an album with the finished article, a fine example of Haydn, at its centre, with four-part string pieces from 100 years earlier around it..
Purcell and Locke are more complex and shifting in these performances than one might expect. A comparison of the Curtain Tune on a ground from Purcell's Timon of Athens can be instructively set against the 1994 recording by Collegium Musicum/Richard Hickox to reveal the Kitgut Quartet as vibrant, spirited and energetic in comparison with the ceremonial feel of the closing passage of the complete masque.
It's as if C21st interpretations of C17th have been released by something more elemental in C20th music, not that we have any evidence how Purcell expected his music to sound. But the Kitguts use catgut strings, richer and more resonant than more recent innovations and in the Haydn Op. 71, no.2 we have the benefit of both worlds in a measured, ever inventive, nuanced performance that finds plenty and gains further from tremendous clarity in the playing and recording. That remains the highlight, nimble if not quicksilver in the faster tempi and gorgeous in its slower paces. It is the obvious highlight even after a number of hearings when further listening allows Purcell, Locke and John Blow's subdued finale to catch up a bit.
If at first I thought I'd just got an excellent Haydn quartet and would have preferred another, it is an album that works on its own terms and if it isn't quite the last word in wherer the string quartet came from like an equation that explains Purcell Fantasia + Matthew Locke Consort of Four Parts = Haydn Quartet, it is English music played with French panache.
String quartets as such don't take up as much of my time as they might, which is not to say that chamber music as a genre is under-represented, especially after the recent Beethoven and Brahms Trio Festival I've been having. But one day I might have them all to pick from, Shostakovich being already here and investigations revealing that in such editions as Brilliant Classics, one could use less than £500 of one's retirement lump sum on the Complete Bach, Handel, Mozart and Beethoven. And since money is for buying the things you want, why wouldn't I. There would be no excuse for having nothing to do, one would just have to live long enough to play them all.
