The Anglo-Dutch composer Gerard Schurmann (b. 1924), made his mark as a pianist and composer chamber music and, later, of film scores, among them Ealing comedies and Hammer horrors. His concert output is intense, passionate, tightly argued and charged with energy, but also infused with lyricism, as these four pieces demonstrate. Schurmann has taken the idea of ‘late quartets’ rather further than Beethoven: these first two numbered quartets date from his ninth decade.
