MUSICAL OPINION:
The range of worthwhile issues on the Divine Art label continues to expand with this outstanding release of three relatively recent string quartets by British composers. The most important work here is that by Robert Saxton, a remarkable score playing for around 30 minutes and utterly compelling in its strength and sheer passion, allied to quartet writing which is never less than genuine. This is not to imply that the other two works are unworthy – they are both well worth recording and well worth the attention of music-lovers. Judith Weir's Quartet is the shortest of the three, and perhaps could have been longer in terms of developing the nature of her material, which suggests a longer work. I look forward to her Quartet no. 2. John Casken's Second Quartet is a very well structured piece, again with a real grasp of what a string quartet should be, entirely free from tricks or other absurdities. The performances, in the absence of scores, seem very fine and totally committed, and the recording quality is excellent.

Very strongly recommended.
Robert Matthew-Walker

MUSICWEB:
These three British composers were born within half a decade in the years between 1949 and 1954. The disc's title is a fetching though not wholly appropriate one on which to peg the three quartets. Best to listen to them without worrying about  ‘Northernness' or matters astronomical, though the last does play a part in the Saxton.

John Casken wrote his Second Quartet in 1993 and it was revised three years later. It's cast in four movements each one bearing an indication such as ‘with piquant verve' or ‘with haunted fascination'. I suppose it's up the interpreters to convey ‘piquancy' with the requisite relish. In fact the Kreutzer Quartet has been solidly coached by the composer so are in a better position than most to transit his wishes. The first movement oscillates between firefly vivacity and a more mellow lyrical-expressive line. The second movement is a scherzo of ‘jazzy obstinacy' – make of that what you will - whilst the third is a slow movement of considerable post-impressiontic colour and reflective and refractive intimacy, one lit by little flurries. Ravel-like pizzicati animate the finale, full of vibrancy, but towards the end stronger, more personal intimations intrude and the work ends in slight ambiguity.

I was aware of Judith Weir 's 1990 Quartet from The Cold Dancer - Contemporary String Quartets from Scotland on Delphian DCD34038 where it was coupled with works by James Clapperton, Kenneth Dempster and William Sweeney. It's also on Genuin GEN86065 adventurously coupled with Elgar and Maxwell Davies, so it's something of a disc veteran by now. It pushes for what Weir calls “on the string” lyricism. Each of the three movements is based on a Spanish romance (first two) and a Scottish ballad (for the finale). The writing has her accustomed grace and generosity – in the central movement it also embraces earthier, vocalised beauties of its own. It sounds very rewarding to play. My recollection is that the Delphian performance was just a tad more austere than the Kreutzer, and the latter group certainly enjoys the folkloric second in particular where the rhythmic energy is palpable.

Finally we have Songs, Dances and Ellipses by Robert Saxton, written in 1997 and revised the following year. Once again, as with the Casken, the composer supervised the recording session. This work has five movements though moves sinuously in one span. It opens in Mahlerian midst with tension increasing, moving to a tempestuous but still austere second section, marked ‘light, dancing'. The heart of the work is the long, ten-minute third movement – a spacious stasis that grips and doesn't let go. There's a scherzo-like incisiveness to the succeeding movement and a driving then winding-down energy to the finale.

There are some good, helpful notes and the sound quality in a church that's almost down my road (pure coincidence) is first class. These recordings have been on the shelf for a long time; they were recorded between 1999 and 2002. Well done to Metier for giving them the oxygen of publicity.
Jonathan Woolf

THE WIRE:
Judith Weir would once have been my pick of these three composers, but John Casken's String Quartet No. 2 stands out on an excellent disc by the Kreutzer Quartet. Born in Yorkshire in 1949, Casken studied with Witold Lutoslawski, and is probably best known for his highly successful opera Golem , premiered in 1989. There's a knotty integrity to his music, whose outwardly traditional forms and tonal idioms shouldn't distract from its enduring substance. The quartet exploit the medium's resources with a mastery that suggests later Bartók, its idiomatic nuances of touch and timbre beautifully captured by the Kreutzer Quartet. Judith Weir, in contrast, feels the allure of postmodernism, and her String Quartet from 1990 is fey and beguiling. The disc concludes with the rather less memorable and certainly less idiomatic Songs, Dances and Ellipses by Robert Saxton.
Andy Hamilton

NOTTINGHAM EVENING POST:
Composer Judith Weir's native Aberdeen probably inspired the album's title. Hers is the shortest of three pieces featured, each of them written within the last 20 years. Bridget Carey's viola figures prominently in Weir's stark yet elusive musical landscape.

Yorkshireman John Casken also qualifies as a northerner, albeit another whose vision transcends region. The movement headings give an idea of his energetic String Quartet No. 2: “with piquant verve,” “ jazzy obstinacy,” “haunted fascination” and “playful determination.”

Robert Saxton's Songs, Dances and Ellipses progress in five continuous sections, with a still, calm voice at their heart. Recorded at the turn of the millennium, the Kreutzers respond brilliantly to all their music's mercurial demands. ««««
Peter Palmer

INTERNATIONAL RECORD REVIEW:
The three late-twentieth-century quartets recorded here highlight three distinct creative personalities, and growing acquaintance with the Kreutzer Quartet's strong performances of them reveals their powerful individuality.

John Casken's Second Quartet seems to follow a very traditional four-movement structure, one that even Haydn might have recognized, though he would likely have been bemused by the composer's expressive indications. For the first movement, we have ‘with piquant verve': this opening Allegro features kaleidoscope oscillations of mood and texture. The music will often settle into dense, four-part lyricism, only to surge into spiky life again. The second movement is surely a scherzo, and is marked ‘with jazzy obstinacy'. The slow movement is the longest, and successfully grips one throughout. Though predominantly subdued, there are song-like fragments punctuated by skitterings and flitterings; maybe these relate in some unspoken way to the marking ‘with haunted fascination'. Traditionally again, the finale is lighter-hearted, a kind of perpetuum mobile with even some moments of tune and accompaniment, all marked ‘with playful determination'. Casken's quartet certainly adds up to an impressive whole.

As does, in a very different way, Judith Weir's. Its three continuous movements last only 13 minutes, and I hear them as a kind of progression, from static initial keening, then with some Scotch snaps developing, then with the swaying rhythm of the lower strings at the start of the middle movement expanding outwards to all parts, and culminating in the short Presto finale, a will-o'-the-wisp of a movement that is a kind of sotto voce dance to constantly pulsing rhythms. This is all done with Weir's characteristic mixture of austerity and lean lyricism: each movement, in fact, has its origin in an earlier Weir song. I hope she writes another quartet soon.

Robert Saxton's quartet, Songs, Dances and Ellipses is perhaps a slightly tougher nut and it is interesting that he eschews the abstract title in favour of something more specific: singing and dancing do indeed seem to provide one clue, with the first and second movements given over to each notional activity in turn, and the last movement marked ‘dancing, quick'. However this is a five-movement piece, and at its heart is a darkly meditative ten-minute slow movement: out of this, there is a progression back to speed and light. The ‘ellipses' of the title are an astronomical reference but refer to a structural principle, that of speeding up as we reach an apex… I haven't yet felt this in operation convincingly, or quite felt the work to function as an organic whole, but maybe this is just a matter of time.

I'm not sure that the title ‘Northern Lights' is hugely helpful, though admittedly Weir has Scottish ancestry, and Casken has written a lot of music with Northern affiliations. The booklet notes, though, are entirely helpful. It has taken a long time for this issue to reach the market: one of the pieces was recorded a decade ago. The other two are of not much more recent vintage, but is was worth the wait.
Piers Burton-Page

MIDWEST RECORD:
Featuring the works of three composers that are leading lights in contemporary music, everything falls right into place on this set that explores fun, upbeat stuff that is dancing right on the edge of being party music in its own right.  A set of debut recordings by a string quartet that takes things out of the drawing room quite nicely, this delightful ear opener is nothing less than a real treat.
Chris Spector

LIVERPOOL DAILY POST:
Northern Lights is the title of a recital by the Kreutzer Quartet of three contemporary composers. John Casken of Manchester University contributes his second quartet which is audience-friendly, almost giving itself away with its movement titles – with piquant verve, with jazzy obstinacy, with haunted fascination and with playful determination. I enjoyed it and admired the slow movement, a strong feature [also] of Judith Weir's quartet which is also to be found here. Robert Saxton calls his quartet Songs, Dances and Ellipses, perhaps a little misleading, as I didn't find the piece as approachable at first hearing as the others to be found here. But persistence pays off, and this makes a fine performance on the Metier label.
Peter Spaull

THE INDEPENDENT:
The Kreutzer Quartet's triptych of British string quartets from the 1990s can be enjoyed as a single journey: cold, colder, coldest.

John Casken's "String Quartet No 2" applies Debussian sensuality to a barren landscape, while Judith Weir's "String Quartet" looks back to the nagging disquiet of Tippett and Britten in melancholic Purcellian figures. Robert Saxton's "Songs, Dances and Ellipses" prods at dissonance like a tongue at a sore tooth. The performance is strong, though Peter Sheppard Skaerved's solo sounds effortful. Anna Picard

THE GUARDIAN:
"Northern Lights" may be a sexier title for this collection than the prosaically accurate "Three British string quartets from the 1990s" would have been, but it's misleading. Of the composers represented, only John Casken hails from north of the Trent, though Judith Weir (born in Cambridge) does come from a Scottish family; Robert Saxton has no obvious northern connections at all. What does link the works, however, is craftsmanship and integrity, as well as the obvious care with which the Kreutzer quartet performs them. Weir's three-movement work, from 1990, with its effortlessly transparent textures and folksy, Britten-esque echoes, makes a nice counterbalance to the more substantial, highly wrought pieces either side of it. Casken's 1993 work, couched in a Bergian harmonic language with jazzy rhythmic inflections to give it fizz, is the more formally conventional, while Saxton's Songs, Dances and Ellipses of 1997 is a five-movement arch that pivots about a central extended slow movement.
Andrew Clements

THE SUNDAY TIMES:
These three quartets written by British composers in the 1990s would seem to have little to do with the aurora borealis, as illustrated on the booklet cover, and though Casken and Judith Weir share northern backgrounds, the disc's title is misleading. What links two of the works, Casken's String Quartet No 2 and Robert Saxton's Songs, Dances and Ellipses, is the well-digested influence of Berg. Casken transforms the expressionist heritage with his own clarity of outlines and sometimes jazz-inflected brio; Saxton deepens it with an invocation of viol music and a personal ardour. Weir's String Quartet suggests a quite different background, a folk art of transparent surfaces, with just a hint of murk.
Paul Driver