String Quartet no.2 was written between June 2010 and April 2011. All the music in the piece derives from 12 versions of a 19-bar fragment, subdivided and redistributed so as to form five short movements.
The fractured, uncertain routes followed by this music mirror the nightly journeys taken by the blindfolded Vincentio di Vivaldi through the prisons of the Inquisition in Rome, in Anne Radcliffe’s novel “The Italian” (1797).