Swedish composer Dag Wirén's (1905-1986) prevalence outside of his native country is still a work in progress, but maybe this new Naxos recording of all his String Quartets (the First was withdrawn by the composer) will help move the process along. Available recordings of these quartets are rare to say the least. For a 20th century composer, his style could arguably be considered conservative, although he did dabble for a while in some sort of "metamorphic minimalism". He greatly admired Nielsen, Sibelius, Holmboe, Honegger and Prokofiev, but still placed more importance on the classics like Bach and Mozart. He wrote five symphonies, violin, cello, and piano concertos, operas, stage works, chamber and incidental orchestral works. His most famous piece is the 1937 Serenade for strings.

The evolution of his string quartets, which span a period from 1935 to 1970, could be viewed as follows: writing music for a string quartet, to writing music to be played by a string quartet. These two arguments may sound like one and the same, but they're quite different. The earlier being conscious of the four individual instruments and spreading the musical workload accordingly, and the latter focusing more on dynamically organic and textural development, sonically or musically. In other words, the clear-cut four-part harmony or counterpoint present in the String Quartet No. 2, is replaced by a more symbiotic relationship between the instruments, feeding off each other's voice, as in the haunting Lento from the String Quartet No. 4, written almost twenty years later. And by the time you reach No. 5, the tonality may not always be obvious, but the expressive musical narrative still strives to communicate its intent clearly.

The Wirén Quartet, formed in 1994, are constant guests at international chamber music festivals, and their repertoire covers everything from Beethoven to Vasks, but they do specialize in Swedish music, with special attention to the music of Dag Wirén. They certainly do seem to have found the expressive core of each one of these quartets, and no amount of swift technical demands or brooding rumination goes unexplored under their attentive devotion to this music. It's great to have all of Wirén's extant string quartets, performed this well, collected together on one disc.