as performed by Michael Jackson-Beat It is one of Michael Jackson?s most popular songs. Seen by many as a rock song Beat It was ranked by Rolling Stone magazine as one of the ?100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time? due to the notable inclusion of guitarist Eddie van Halen and was also awarded two Grammys for Record of the Year and Best Male Rock Vocal Performance at the 1984 ceremony. Since its release the song has been covered by various artists such as Fall Out Boy Fergie and most recently Anthony Gröger who has made this energetic arrangement for string quartet.

String Quartet in C-sharp minor op. 131. Many anecdotes surround String Quartet op. 131: Beethoven is said to have considered it to be his finest quartet and of his late period works, the one dearest to his heart. It is also believed that the composer invested so much of himself in it: his ailing health, the social isolation brought about by his deafness and the suicide attempt of his nephew Karl. In addition it was reported that Franz Schubert asked to hear this piece once more on his deathbed. Even if these anecdotes are not all true, they reveal what generations of musicians felt they heard in this quartet: Beethoven?s most personal musical idiom and a vulnerable message from the final period of his life. This new edition by Jonathan Del Mar represents a thorough revision of this highly complex work. Meticulously incorporated are Beethoven?s pencil markings that were previously almost completely ignored.

PrefaceThe three movements of the quartet may be perceived as three different expressions of an unstable core: an inherent unrest leads to frequent changes of direction. The first movement is full of dramatic contrasts; it is followed by a second movement whose basic mood of meditative rest is challenged by occasional centrifugal utbursts while the third movement takes the inherent conflicts to a higher level contrasting material of introspective lyricism with excessively pathetic moods.The final ?way out? is a retrograde one (back) ?into the source?: through a constant accelerando-diminuendo the piece disappears into a vanishing point. The ?into thesource? of the title may be visualized as a reversed fountain-action: the broad fan-like spread of the first movement a more coherent-solid second movement and finally - in the third movement - a return-run ever more vehemently like a suction into the spring itself ?The musical motifs are varied; there are traffic-situations (which I heard!) with stomping and machine-like rhythms in different but simultaneous tempi and there are more abstract upwards and downwards half-tone-scales with changing accents creating glimpses of melodies.INTO THE SOURCE String Quartet No. 9 was composed on a double-commission from the Orion Quartet and the Vertavo Quartet. The premiere performances took places in Santa Fé in 2002 and in Oslo in 2003.Per Nørgård

Ian Venables' The Song Of The Severn is a cycle of songs in celebration of Worcestershire scored for Baritone Voice String Quartet and Piano. “The Song of the Severn…clothes poems by Masefield Housman John Drinkwater and Philip Worner in sharply memorable music of bewitching lyricism idiomatic grace and rapt instinct…No lover of the early-20th-century English art song or pastoral tradition should fail to investigate this notable issue.” - Andrew Achenbach Gramophone “These five songs for voice with piano and string quartet accompaniment take the Severn Riverand its historical and natural associations as a common theme. They are absolutely stunning in their poignant beauty their profoundly noble and moving sense of tragedy and desolation that never turns sentimental or lachrymose and their perfect union of text and music to a level that rivals Schubert and Mahler.” - James A. Altena Fanfare Magazine

for string quartet-Song Recollections is based on the beautiful folk music of Taiwanese aboriginal tribes which I fell in love with many years ago. My good friends from Taiwan introduced these songs to me when I was a college student. I was and still am amazed by this magical music! My quartet treats each song as a musical ‘landscape’ through which one can ‘travel’. To compose a work is very much like curating a journey for a listener to traverse through the song’s inner terrain and sonic landscape. Lei Liang