EndellioNIGMA is a short piece written in honour of forty years of matchless performances and recordings by the great Endellion Quartet, who are my colleagues and very good friends. It charts the development of a string quartet as it evolves from four individual musicians, each moving at his own pulse, to a unified instrument. After an introduction, in which these conflicting pulses are laid out one by one, there are four variations - in which they gradually coalesce - and finally a theme in which the quartet plays as a single instrument. The piece ends with a ghostly echo of Elgar.

Giles Swayne