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Hidden treasures: Charles Wood string quartets

2026-06-26T08:41:00

Charles Wood Cambridge2

To mark the centenary year of the composer’s death, Jeremy Dibble explores Charles Wood’s six string quartets, in which his Irish background and meticulous craft found their most personal expression

Though undoubtedly best known for his church music, Charles Wood composed a highly sophisticated series of string quartets that were a profound expression of his retiring, private, introspective personality. They are rarely performed today, yet they provide an intimate window into the composer’s soul in their combination of technical brilliance, formal invention and use of folk melody, attributes that make this impressive corpus of works worthy of rediscovery and reappraisal…

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