Just as Gerard Schwarz has fervently championed David Diamond's orchestral music in recent years, the Washington D.C.-based Potomac String Quartet has launched a cycle that will encompass all 11 of the composer's string quartets. The first release opens with Diamond's Concerto for String Quartet, dating from the composer's 21st year. Not only has Diamond already mastered the string quartet medium, but his stylistic fingerprints are firmly evident, from his predilection for busy yet never cluttered counterpoint to a gift for cloaking wistful lyricism in a blanket of tough love. I'm especially taken with the Adagio movement, an extended aria for cello with sustained, texturally varied support from the other strings. The Scherzo Finale is a jaunty fugue, full of displaced accents and unexpected harmonic detours designed to catch both casual and careful listeners off guard.

Quartet No. 3 commences with a songful, flowing movement that ends on a high violin note sustained in midair. Short, stabbing motives and darting scale passages characterize the more aggressive Allegro vivo. The concluding Adagio is a touching 11-minute threnody interweaving paragraphs of long, arching lines and gently militant repeated notes. By the time Diamond wrote his masterful Eighth Quartet he had embraced and internalized atonal styles, revitalizing his expressive arsenal in the process. In turn, the Potomac String Quartet has mastered these scores to the point where the composer's frequent dynamic and mood contrasts are organically integrated and projected with assertion and purpose. Highly recommended.

--Jed Distler