SURFACING | THE STRAD - REVIEW

Joyful conviction marks out a highly personal debut album

by David Kettle | November 2026

The players of the Poiesis Quartet got together at Oberlin Conservatory in 2022, won the 2025 Banff International String Quartet Competition and are currently in residence at Philadelphias Curtis Institute. And on the strength of this disc of pieces the quartet has lived with for a long time, it's clearly a very special ensemble indeed. Its performances are simply breathtaking in terms of colour, life, drama and commitment, with every chord, melody and gesture mined for meaning, and shot through with apparently unstoppable energy.

It probably goes without saying that the Poiesis makes extremely strong cases for the works it has gathered here, too. The String Quartet by Alabama-born Brian Raphael Nabors collides together jazz, funk, R&B and classical in its succession of wildly vivid episodes, and the Poisis delivers it with just the right balance of flamboyance, fantasy and impeccable control.

It navigates the more expansive ideas of Kevin Lau's Surfacing expertly, and remains wonderfully straight-faced amid the gleefully chaotic cascades of gestures in Sky Macklay's Many Many Cadences. Best of the lot, however, is Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson's 1956

First Quartet 'Calvary', which weaves references to the African-American spiritual into its blues-and gospel-inflected language, and gets a warm but bracing account that brims over with belief in Perkinson's remarkably inclusive idiom.

It's rare to encounter a disc of such conviction and all-embracing joy, but in sharing their personal passions, the Poiesis players have created something quite remarkable.