Garth Knox is at the forefront of the new music scene in many fields. Drawing on his vast experience as viola player of the Arditti Quartet and the Ensemble Intercontemporain and his close collaboration with most of the leading composers of today, he has become a unique performer of music of many different styles, ranging from minimalist understatement to the cutting edge of new techniques and new technologies.
More recently thanks to his interest in the medieval fiddle and the Viola d’amore, for which Donald J. Stewart’s RELATIO was written, his repertoire has opened up to the music of the past (medieval, baroque) which he persuasively brings into the present, and his Irish/Scottish roots enable him to dialogue with traditional Celtic music without complexes. His first solo CD, Works for Viola on Naïve Records, won the Deutscher Schallplattenpreis, the second is called Spectral Viola on Zeitklang records, and a recent Viola d’Amore with ECM Records was record of the month in the British magazine Gramophone. He has always felt at home as an improviser, and now more and more so as a composer also, deploying his musical ideas as innovative instrumental theatre.