The Anglo-Dutch composer Gerard Schurmann, born in the East Indies in 1924 and based in the USA since 1981, marked his 90th birthday on 19 January, an event celebrated by this release. Schurmann first made his mark in Britain in the 1940s and ’50s, as a pianist and composer, particularly of 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.

The Lyris Quartet described as ‘radiant’, ‘excellent’ and ‘powerfully engaged’ by Mark Swed in The Los Angeles Times, was founded in 2008, the culmination of years of collaboration between its members in many different Los Angeles ensembles. Clive Greensmith, cello, joined the Tokyo String Quartet in 1999 and has performed with the group in the most prestigious venues and concert series across the United States, Europe, Australia and the Far East. Grammy-nominated Swedish clarinetist Håkan Rosengren has performed as concerto soloist throughout Europe and the USA and in Brazil, China, Israel and South Korea. Mikhail Korzhev, piano, is equally active as a solo recitalist, chamber musician and orchestral soloist. In 2006, as a winner of the Virginia Waring International Piano Competition he gave a recital in the Konzerthaus in Vienna.