This is the 18-1 of my childhood, my dreams, my heart. My program notes, I hope, describe the way in which 18-1 is elemental, foundational, and influential of everything that came after – and the best thing I can say is: so too, is this recording, for me. My Dad’s quartet made this recording – which is actually a live performance, with the tiniest and most minimal editing from another live performance – in 1982, four years before I was born. My Mom loves to tell the story that she brought me to my first Juilliard Quartet concert when I was two weeks old: she carried me in a basket to Carnegie Hall, and sat with me backstage, listening on speakers, while they played a Beethoven Quartet Cycle. (If you’re thinking “This explains a lot,” you’d be right.)

Donald Martino is one of the great American composers of all: a master of lyricism, humor, complex polyphony, and rhythmic drama. This is deeply-felt, deeply evocative music: it is Italianate, mercurial, gorgeously melodic; it is hot-tempered and emotionally complex; it changes mood at the virtuosic drop of an especially beautiful hat.