1. What was your personal motivation for forming the Tippett Quartet?
A love of playing chamber music, working in a team and promoting all kinds of music, not just classical.
Innovation, inclusivity and originality. As a openly gay composer and a pacifist in mid 20th Century Britain, Michael Tippett was not afraid to stand out from the crowd and speak with an original voice.
This was Matt Skelton’s idea. He is the most fantastic jazz drummer and an essential component of the John Wilson Orchestra. All of the quartet have at some point played in the JWO and have a love of the 1940’s & 50’s Hollywood Musical. We especially admire the Hollywood String Quartet whose members were all players in the big film studio orchestras of that era (MGM, 20th Century Fox etc). The leader of the Hollywood Quartet, Felix Slatkin, was a close friend of Frank Sinatra. With the help of the legendary arranger Nelson Riddle the quartet recorded an album of ballads with Sinatra in 1956 titled ‘Close To You’.
Rehearsing and performing these songs is enormous fun and it’s gratifying to hear how the music relates to the film and chamber music of the era. It’s classy music.
I love how each of these pieces tells a story. Panufnik’s quartets are very linear in nature, they start with a very simple theme and take it on a journey through a evocative soundscape. It’s like listening to a film, it’s quite magical. Lutoslawski works mainly with pure abstract sound and texture rather than harmony and dissonance. We relished in the opportunity to not sound like a quartet but something more synth-like, percussive and or alien.