Threaded Light

Commissioned by the Mavron Quartet for its tenth anniversary, with funds from the PRS for Music foundation’s Women Make Music award, Rhian Samuel’s Threaded Light presents a novel take on the string-quartet genre. Two of its movements include a percussive element played by members of the ensemble, with an optional percussion part for a fifth player. In addition, the unusual seven-movement structure arises from two elements: the idea of a thread, continuous, stretched or broken; and, contrasting with this notion, the influence of pictorial imagery in the slow, evocative second and sixth movements (‘Late Sun’ and ‘Estuary by Moonlight’) inspired by the impression of light passing through clouds near the composer’s home on the hills above Aberdyfi in mid-Wales. Deriving from shared material, three abstract, prelude-like movements entitled ‘Twine’ (Nos. 1, 4 and 7) act as the ‘thread’ that binds the work into a whole, placing the cloudscapes and the similarly luminous percussion-based inventions, No. 3, ‘Glinting Stars’ and No. 5, ‘Foxtrot Gleam’, within the framework of an overall and satisfying symmetry.