String Quartets 1–3

String Quartets 1–3 is a 1991 album by the Balanescu Quartet (Alexander Balanescu, Jonathan Carney, Kate Musker, and Tony Hinnigan) and the fifteenth release by Michael Nyman. It is the second album of his music (after Out of the Ruins) on which he did not perform or conduct, though he does provide liner notes. String Quartet No. 3 is built out of Out of the Ruins and became a fixture in numerous Nyman film scores in the 1990s.

The album was issued by Argo Records with two different covers. Decca Records reissued the album in the UK on July 8, 2002, as part of the British Music Collection, giving it yet a third cover.

Nyman's four string quartets are the subject of chapter 7 in Pwyll ap Siôn's The Music of Michael Nyman: Texts, Contexts, and Intertexts.

The album is the first of several recordings of the Nyman string quartets. The Lyric Quartet would also record String Quartets 2 and 3, and sections of String Quartet No. 4 on String Quartets 2, 3 & 4/If & Why (2002). The Nyman Quartet (Musker and Hinnigan with violinists Gabrielle Lester and Catherine Thompson), according to the liner notes of Acts of Beauty • Exit no Exit (2006), is set to record all four some time in the future.

The album was reissued by MN Records with a new cover and liner notes in November 2012. This edition is subtitled "Chamber Music Vol. II". It is not the aforementioned rerecording.