Asked to sum up how he would characterize his two String Quartets - written in a neoclassical style and influenced by the sound world of Bruckner and Schoenberg - Michael Finnissy answered ‘rich and chewy’!

Composer Judith Weir says she regards Finnissy as the most important living British composer. Despite having no score (the piece is a series of parts, each prefaced by the instruction that it is 'intended that parts should drift slightly apart'), Michael Finnissy's Second Quartet is 'based on a compact Haydn model' - originally intended to be the 'Lark', Op.64, No.5 - and traces of its antecedent can be discerned within it.

By contrast, the Third Quartet incorporates actual birdsong, both transcribed and recorded, in the composer's response to the natural world and our place in it: the instruments gradually fade out, to leave only the sound of birds.