The works of Alfred Hill make interesting listening for those who have always suspected there was more to Australasian music of this period than Percy Grainger. Born in Australia in 1869, Hill was raised in New Zealand and trained in Leipzig. He became a prolific composer, and this is the last instalment of the Dominion Quartet’s series encompassing all 17 of his string quartets. The final three, all apparently receiving their first recording, date from the late 1930s – but you wouldn’t know it from Hill’s writing, which displays his reverence for the northern hemisphere’s past masters of the form, especially Schubert and Dvořák. All are finely crafted and worth hearing. The slower movements tend to have a melancholic bent that brings John Ireland to mind; the faster ones skip with folk-music rhythms, especially in No 16, the “Celtic” Quartet, which lives up to its name with its jaunty appropriation of an Irish jig.
