Join Dr Lucy Walker as she discusses Maconchy's life and works, with particular attention to her beautiful eighth string quartet.

British-Irish Maconchy, like her contemporaries Grace Williams and Elisabeth Lutyens, attended the Royal College of Music and studied with Ralph Vaughan Williams. She was greatly influenced by European music - particularly Bartok - and travelled to Prague to study in the 1930s. During her lifetime she composed orchestral and chamber music, as well as operatic works - perhaps most famously a hilariously bawdy opera called The Sofa with a libretto by Ursula Vaughan Williams. Bartok's influence can be heard across her remarkable series of string quartets (numbering 13 in total), and in particular Quartet no. 8, often considered to be one of her finest works.