These three compositions, none of which has been recorded before, all have extra-musical connections to the visual arts. Quartet No. 5, Dancers on a Plane (1993), is named after Jasper Johns's painting and started life as music for a television film. The first movement of the Fourth Quartet originated in 1990 as part of a ''dance opera'', Correspondences, based on the life of the self-taught theoretical mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920); the second movement, added in 1994, was reworked from the purely orchestral 100 Frames. Movement, an original and effective study, was composed in 1987 as Quartet No. 2, afterwards renumbered 3, Notes d'un peintre (after a Matisse essay), to mark a retrospective for the painter Andrew Verster. Both title and numbers have since been removed, the latter now allocated to Hunting: Gathering (1987) and The Songlines (1988) respectively (Argo, 8/94).
All three works here are testimony to the composer's clear, if unconventional, affinity for the quartet medium, yet doubts persist about the efficacy of the forms evolved. The fluency of the Ramanujan Notebooks betrays little of its piecemeal construction, but the static nature of the harmonic language may not appeal to admirers of, say, Simpson, Holmboe. This is even more the case with the single-span Dancers on a Plane, which employs a tape of ''natural sound recordings from the landscape of [Volans's] former homeland'' – South Africa. As a soundscape it is very atmospheric; as absolute music the half-hour duration is too long and the structure sags. I missed the sheer verve of Volans's earlier works, such as White Man Sleeps. But verve is certainly not lacking in the Duke Quartet's incisive playing, captured in flawless sound. R1 '9507081'