The 4th Quartet is thought to have been composed over a period of about a month or so (April) in 1940: not bad going considering that 3 movements (+ a couple of variations from movement 2) are fast - or rather very fast, that's about 38 minutes music and 89 pages of published score. The 32 piano pieces (c.90 minutes) took Skalkottas a similar amount of composition time later the same year.

There seems to be very little written about this work beyond commentary on its length and hints regarding a "legendary" repution. Indeed, the sleeve-note isn't that useful beyond general formal aspects and the notion that the 1st movement is formally a "trial run" for The return of Ulysses.  No doubt the world hasn't got to grips with the work as yet - I believe the first performance only happened in 1969 (by the Parrinen quartet) and there have probably been very few (if any?) outings since , apart presumably from the New Hellenic Quartet, who made this recording.

A simple description would suggest something pretty traditional: -
Movement 1 - Sonata form - Allegro molto vivace
Movement 2 - Theme and 6 variations with Coda
Movement 3 - Scherzo + Trio - Presto
Movement 4 - Rondo - Allegro giusto (e ben ritmato)
whereas the reality is something quite untraditional, uncompromising and out of the ordinary. There's a huge range of colour and playing techniques, and a level of difficulty both for the ensemble and the individual players that is quite breathtaking. Having followed it through with the score, I'm bemused at how the players actually managed to play some of it - the 3rd movement in particular - and that's absolutely electrifying.

Take the first movement: even at dotted crotchet = 90-100 (say - which is somewhat  less than indicated) there's a goodly amount of semiquavers which have to be played 9 or 10 to the second. On top of which there's a fair amount of double-stopping in each movement, let alone an occasional fondness for 12-note chords throughout. Let's not even think about the intonation difficulties. I imagine the writing is as idiomatic as you would expect from a composer who was once a virtuoso violinist and experienced quartet player. But the 1st violin part in particular still looks horrifying in every movement and is seldom short of many leger lines for long. (The New Hellenic's 1st violinist is Georgios Demertzis who has recorded other Skalkottas pieces for BIS, most notably the violin concerto).
Even the Theme and Variations has its whirlwind moments and it never feels genuinely slow. At 15 minutes it's the longest movement by far and the scale of the variations (there are only 6 plus a Coda) are reminiscent of a similar strategy in the orchestral Largo Simfonico from the 2nd Symphonic Suite. The 4th Variation turned out to be a bit of a surprise, containing as it does clear references (motivic, rhythmic and textural) to the 3rd movement of Hindemith's 5th Kammermusik - the one featuring solo viola. A playful bit of memory at work here: the rest of the quartet as a whole contains virtually nothing reminiscent of even the fierce moments of, say, Bartok or Schoenberg's quartets. No doubt the sleeve-note is accurate in its confident assertion that the Scherzo is modelled on the symphonic scherzos of Bruckner and Dvorak, but that statement seems laughably irrelevant for the moment from where I'm sitting.
I'm no expert on 20th century string quartets, but this is surely one of the major achievements in the medium and one you're least likely to hear. Get a taste from from clips above. I'm looking forward to getting to know it better. I was impressed by the 3rd Quartet. This one's almost unbelievable.

They certainly are. I was astonished when I first heard them that anyone would wish to commit such sloppy playing to disc, let alone someone with such a reputation as a "virtuoso". What happened I wonder.

Violin Sonatinas 1-4.

These appear on the BIS recording entitled Music for violin and piano together with the early solo violin sonata and a number of short later pieces with piano accompaniment. The violinist is Georgios Demertzis - he recorded the violin concerto and is leader of the New Hellenic 4tet.

All have 3 movements, although the outer movements of no. 1 are missing. 1 dates from 1928 (according to Papaioannou) and 2 from 1929 - i.e. towards the end of his study with Schoenberg whereas 3 and 4 appeared early in 1935 and were the first works after a long period of depression which had prevented him composing anything apart from some (?) of the Greek dances.
The surviving movement of 1 is 12-note - attractive with jazz references, rhythmic and melodic, but without any hint of jazz spirit. 2 may also be 12-note: it's often difficult to tell with Skalkottas whereas it's usually more obvious with, say, Schoenberg and Berg. I'd be willing to bet that the 3rd movement isn't, although I don't have the accompanying CD notes. These movements sound more highly charged and the first two sound like concentrated miniatures - each of them is between 2' and 2'30".

Sonatinas 3 and 4 were the first pieces written in order to try his new version of the 12-note system*. It's interesting to compare the 20s works with those of the 30s. No 3, for example, is more earnest, rather less excitable and certainly less cheery and with an impressively bleak slow movement although the writing for the individual instruments is not much different from before. Both 3 and 4 are about twice the length of 2, partly because the middle (slow) movements are typically around double the length of each of the outer movements. 4 is even more serious and the middle movement is a real winner, covering as it does a surprisingly wide expressive range in its 6'42". At 4'10" (do I detect a Golden section?) there's a striking 45 second high lyrical line which both instruments play in unison. Demertzis plays entirely without vibrato here - perhaps it's marked as such. Indeed there's a minimum of vibrato throughout the whole movement (and elsewhere). Possibly he's taken a tip from John Papaioannou's account of Skalkottas's playing in relation to a private performance the two gave of this sonatina c.1942 (see message #22), which, according to him, was the only occasion after 1933 that one of Skalkottas's "modernist" works was performed.

* For those interested in such matters, here's a quote from Papaioannou's extensive notes from the EMI 4-record box.
"The starting point represented by these two sonatinas [3 + 4] is, in itself, quite simple: instead of one unique row used in the classical Viennese system, Skalkottas here uses two: one "melodic" row, mostly for the violin, and one totally different, independent "harmonic" row, usually for the piano. These two rows are the same in all three movements of each Sonatina. The two are heard together in innumerable combinations, but, as usual with Skalkottas (this is something he explicitly states in his writings) he never uses inversions or transpositions of the rows "in order to keep intervallic relations pure"; but he uses retrograde motion freely, and several other types of transformation of his rows that are not mathematically "regular" (i.e., derived according to a simple permutation law and the like) but are rather "topologically" defined: they preserve the proximity relations of internal groups of notes within the series, but the groups may be variable; what is preserved through these transformations, then, is less some "mechanistic" property of the rows, and much more what the ear hears as a "meaningful" pattern. These principles (described here very succinctly) are valid for both Sonatinas 3 and 4, and for all subsequent "twelve-tone" works that Skalkottas wrote during his first Athenian (1935-8) and middle Athenian (1939-45) periods."

hmmm.  just caught up on this thread now.  makes me want to go and listen to some Skalkottas!

Thanks for the comments and the encouragement, guys! Skalkottas has always been a composer I've highly rated since I first heard some stuff in the 1960s. But it's not been until recently that I've begun to get to know some of the pieces well - and that's partly as a result of promptings on this board. So I'll continue to share my findings - which after all is what this board is about.

In the meantime, this link has 4 sizeable samples - a couple of (complete) Greek dances, c. 4'33" of the 2nd piano concerto and a 5-minute movement from a bassoon sonata.

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=152539061

I'm still investigating the string quartets and solo piano pieces so kindly donated and finding them very rewarding. Do the excellent performers have any discography beyond Skalkottas or are they consigned into this box of Greek performers for Greek composers and vice versa ? Wouldn't it be nice if the industry could be more imaginative but BIS should at least be thanked for the project with this music.

The BIS CD notes for the Sonatinas seem to confirm what Papaiaonnou writes about the 3rd sonatina. The 4th is rather more complex being apparently based on 6 rows "the first three [which] are arranged in a vertical contrapuntal configuration, the next three in horizontal succession" - and so forth. The notes for the BIS recordings are always interesting and informative, but they do frequently stray into areas which can seem slightly fanciful and subsequently need more evidence: this might have been evident from previous posts. Take, for example, what I described as "a striking 45 second high lyrical line which both instruments play in unison" in the slow movement of the 4th sonatina:- "This technique is an orchestration technique (a 'duplication') but must be correlated with the folk material Skalkottas had taken from recordings in 1934 and in which combinations of continuous sounds (lyre [presumably lyra, voice) with more percussive sounds (dulcimer,lute) are often heard. Well, that could be perfectly accurate of course . . .

Apparently Willy Hess, his violin teacher in Berlin, encouraged Skalkottas to turn to composition: related, one imagines, to the fact that "Skalkottas was strongly opposed to the branch of music perceived as 'the virtuosi' at that time . . . His theoretical texts of a later era, especially an article entitled Violin technique [c.1934/5] sheds some light on Skalkottas's relationship with his instrument. He writes 'The violin player who touches this instrument after his studies can question the certainty of what he was taught. By leaving aside the truth of virtuosity, the violinist can move on to new conclusions as to the technique of this instrument'." (these notes by Costas Demertzis).

His attitude to conventional virtuosity is perhaps even clearer in the 32 piano pieces. I'd understood Skalkottas to be a "competent" pianist, but a review by William Cerny of the publication of 21 of them by Margun Music (the rest had been published earlier by UE) assures us that he was "an outstanding pianist - with large hands and an extraordinary reach, as is evident in this piece [Catastrophe in the jungle] and many others throughout the collection." Interestingly, he later describes Morning serenade of the little maid, Foxtrot - the old policeman and Fantasic etude as "technical tours de force in which the composer's original metronome markings (as in many other of his works) have been severely lowered by the editor for the sake of performance realization. Even so, the demands of these pieces remain astoundingly formidable and virtually beyond human capability". (my emphasis)