Carl Vine’s music is performed frequently by a wide array of musicians and in many different countries around the world. The works on this album, although commissioned and premiered by various presenters and musicians over a sixteen-year period, have one common factor: they have all been performed at some stage by the Goldner String Quartet or its members. The Quartet has long planned to record them as a complete set in collaboration with their cherished associates, Piers Lane AO and Umberto Clerici. This album realizes that dream.

The music is also linked by the notion of child’s play – the central premise of Vine’s eponymous Sixth String Quartet – inhabiting the irony that a high degree of artifice and expressive subtlety is often required to effectively convey simplicity and childlike innocence in music. These six compositions all aim to uplift and edify with as little artifice as possible, celebrating the unifying effect of shared musical experience.