Tower: String Quartets Nos. 3-5 & Dumbarton Quintet

Widely regarded as one of America's pre-eminent living composers, Joan Tower, who is also a pianist, is particularly devoted to chamber music. Organic structures underpin her string quartets; there is 'heat from within' and radiance of texture in Incandescent, her third quartet, virtuosic interplay in No.4, Angels, and fluid connections in White Water, her fifth string quartet. Only the third composer - after Stravinsky and Copland - to be commissioned by the Dumbarton Oaks Foundation, Dumbarton Quintet pursues extremes of moods both romantically consonant and dissonant.