Quartet ES: Ruehr: The Northern Quartets

The Strad Issue: March 2026

Description: Warm performances of music that sometimes resorts to cliché

Musicians: Quartet ES

Works: Ruehr: String Quartets: no.9 ‘Keweenaw’, no.10 ‘Long Pond’, no.11 ‘Reykjavík’

Catalogue number: AVIE AV2798

Born in Michigan, composer Elena Ruehr now teaches at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has created a rich and wide-ranging catalogue of music across many media.

The three works collected here were commissioned by and for Quartet ES, which divides its time between New England and Iceland. In them, Ruehr sets out to capture her impressions of particular northern locations: the Keweenaw Peninsula in Michigan; a beloved lake in Cape Cod, Massachusetts; and Iceland’s capital city.

There’s no questioning Ruehr’s effortless eloquence and impeccable craft in music that’s sometimes warmly evocative and never less than easy on the ear. But she relies quite heavily, too, on well-worn musical images that have been heard many times before – in the scurrying arpeggios and chilly harmonies in Quartet no.9’s ‘A Blizzard’ movement, for example, or the laid-back, jazzy swung rhythms of the sauntering ‘Dogs on the Beach’ from the Tenth Quartet.

There’s surely a distinction to be made, too, between somewhat naive personal musical responses and perceptive, illuminating revelations, and it’s a line that Ruehr seems to hop across back and forth several times across the three works.

Performances from Quartet ES are enjoyably rich and considered, though a little more grit and a few harder edges might have made them more compelling. Nonetheless, it’s a disc of gently imaginative picture-painting, captured in close, authentic sound.

DAVID KETTLE