Esmé Quartet - Beethoven, Bridge & Chin: To Be Loved - The Sunday Times

Appropriately, all three works on this fine debut recording are their respective composers’ first acknowledged pieces for the medium. In the four movements of Unsuk Chin’s ParaMetaString (1996), the players react with computer-manipulated violin and cello sounds in a fascinating play of texture, colour, attack. On either side of this are a muscular performance of Beethoven’s Op 18, No 1, and a warmly impassioned reading of Frank Bridge’s Novelletten (1904).