Alfred Hill’s String quartet no.3 in a minor, was completed a year after his first. Despite its title, the tone is more serious and less based on folk melodies. Hill named the pieces ‘Carnival or A Student in Italy’. His Eleventh quartet, which was one of Hill’s own favourites, premiered in 1935. Here, styles blend together: the romantic expressiveness of Dvořák, moments reminiscent of Debussy and Ravel, and in the finale, the Maori culture. In his Fourteenth String Quartet from 1937, Hill clearly looked back to the time when he met Tchaikovsky in Germany and when he studied in Leipzig