This is one of the great string quartets of the twentieth century. Intimate in tone, in a rather understated way it mixes the composer's hopes and worries about his distant homeland with his own personal pain. Its excellent and idiomatic part writing for all instruments achieves the ideal of the string quartet: the impression of a kind of co-operative conversation among four friends who are equals in every way.

By the time he wrote this work, Bohuslav Martinu had spent 30 years that resulted in him going ever more distant from his Czech homeland. He joined the generation of young artists working in Paris in 1923 and remained there for years. By 1938 he was planning to return to live permanently in Prague, but had to flee to America when Hitler's forces took France in 1940.

By the time the war was over he had hopes of returning to Europe as soon as conditions settled from a Soviet-led coup that led to 40 years of Communist dictatorship. And then—disaster. In 1946 Martinu fell off a second-floor balcony and smashed his head on the concrete below. Although the skull fracture healed, ear and balance problems remained. Travel was impossible for a while, and when the "Iron Curtain" went down on his homeland, Martinu was still in America.

During his convalescence, Martinu switched from symphonic writing to chamber music. He always loved best to write string quartets, he said, and it is simply a physically easier thing to write down just four instrumental parts to create a full-scale work than to write out the 24 lines or more of an orchestral score. So Martinu wrote his last two quartets in short order.

The quartet is in a standard three-movement layout and lasts around 23 minutes. Commentators have compared it to the chamber music written in America 50 years earlier by Martinu's great predecessor and compatriot Antonin Dvorák. It has the same degree of mastery and maturity of expression, as well as similar rhythmic vitality and charm in its themes, although Martinu's texture is more polyphonic.

The first movement, Allegro moderato, is full of vitality in its inner movements, although there is a restless quality about it. It presents contradictory feelings: upward-tending phrases are often contradicted by sudden falls and dissonances in other parts.

The central Andante movement uses a typical Martinu texture: the lyrical melodic lines and slower harmonies often stand out against fairly rapid figurations in supporting voices. Again, this raises tension. Perhaps it is not reading too much into this texture to perceive a feeling of being tied down.

The final movement, beginning Allegro and then kicking up into Allegro con brio, is rather less pessimistic, and re-established a driving, rapid harmonic motion to propel the terse melodic movements to the rapid conclusion. At the end, hopefulness outweighs oppressiveness, but has not entirely banished it.

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