Philip Glass composed his second string quartet 17 years after his first, although it was initially conceived not as chamber music, but for theatre – a piece of instrumental music for Fred Neumann's adaptation of Samuel Beckett's 1979 novella Company, hence its alias. The Carducci String Quartet precede the work with Haydn’s Op. 33 No. 2 (nicknamed for Haydn’s wrong-footing his audience) and follow with Shostakovich’s Ninth String Quartet, influenced by the famous gallop from Rossini’s William Tell Overture.