A mysterious quality lies at the heart of Timothy Raymond's acclaimed String Quartet, first performed in 2007. Niggling motifs emerge from a dreamlike continuum of harmonic glissandos, sparking a succession of adventurous and unpredictable developments that are by turn tentative, unsettling, determined, energetic, emphatic, furious and lyrical, and characterized by highly varied, idiomatic string writing. The piece pursues a latter-day expressionist path towards, and away from, a sustained and intimately poised centre, the whole reflecting the composer's own colourful synthesis, distillation and development of contemporary composition.