Refreshingly free Violin music by Alan Rawsthorne and John McCabe - appreciated by PETER DALE '... Skærved is dazzlingly good ...'

John McCabe and Alan Rawsthorne -- at least a generation apart -- might seem unlikely partners to share this disc but it is enough that they both share a deep interest in the violin and in reconciling two divergent tendencies in the way composers have used its characteristics: on the one hand, its ancient dithyrambic voice (best exemplified in the 20th century by Bartók, I suppose, but timelessly evident in all folk music) and its intellectualised and sensitised voice in the mature baroque and classical traditions. McCabe was born a year after Rawsthorne wrote his Theme and Variations for Two Violins (1938), and Rawsthorne was dead seven years by the time that McCabe wrote his Star Preludes (1978) [listen -- track 16, 0:00-0:55].

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