London, Conway Hall and Jackson's Lane: Two Graham Williams premières

Graham Williams (Welsh-born, in 1940, but long since London-based) is almost as well known as a facilitator of music as a composer in his own right — a pity, because he has things to say which are worth listening to. My first, belated, encounter with his music came in the form of an Elegy for string octet, premièred by the Artea and Pavão Quartets in the Purcell Room in May 2003, a sober and dignified essay in controlled passion, stylistically somewhere between Alban Berg and the Strauss of Metamorphosen. It was the Artea Quartet which was responsible for my next encounter with Williams' music: they gave the première of his Fourth String Quartet in the Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London, on 21 September 2004 — the three-minute, fourth-movement scherzo trailed four days beforehand in a live performance on In Tune on BBC Radio 3.