The Swedish string ensemble Camerata Nordica and its artistic director Terje Tønnesen made their first joint appearance on BIS in 2013 with an all-Britten programme. Released in conjunction with the ensemble’s début at the BBC Proms, the disc received critical acclaim, with the reviewer on the website ClassicsToday.com including it ‘among the Britten year’s outstanding releases’ and his colleague in BBC Music Magazine agreeing: ‘The Britten centenary can’t have produced finer recorded performances than these, with wonderful dynamic shading, bomproof tuning, and real drama.‘

The team now returns with another programme of 20th-century music for strings - this time by four different composers, and spanning from the years before World War I to a few days before the outbreak of World War II. Bartók, Webern, Prokofiev and Hindemith were all central figures of their time, illustrating - and to an extent personifying - different approaches to modernism in music, and this varied programme touches in turn on neo-classical and neo-baroque idioms, folk music, atonality and impressionism.

But first and foremost the disc offers an exciting and colourful mix of great music, in performances by an ensemble compared in Fanfare to ‘a first-class string quartet. These musicians are completely attuned to each other’s dynamics, attack, phrasing, and blend.