Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)
The Music for String Quartet
Emperor Quartet
John Metcalfe (viola, Phantasy)
rec. 2005-2011, Potton Hall, Suffolk, UK
BIS BIS2640 SACD [3 discs: 200]
This set gathers together in a neat box, three recordings originally issued between 2010 and 2014. The discs are contained within paper sleeves and the three original booklets are reproduced exactly as they were. As the original issues do not seem to have been reviewed on MWI (although they have occasionally been referred to), I shall treat this issue as if it were completely new.
Although Britten is best remembered for his vocal music of various kinds, he also wrote a good deal of music for string quartet, particularly in his earlier years. As well as three numbered quartets, the third written towards the end of his life, there are two complete early quartets and a number of other pieces as well. Much of the early music was withheld at the time and only released many years later, or discovered posthumously. This collection gathers them all, together with the Phantasy for string quintet and a Miniature Suite of which this is the first recording.
The first disc, however, begins with Britten’s best-known quartet, No 2. It is in three movements. The first is based on three themes, rather similar and all beginning with a big leap upwards. The movement is in a modified sonata form. The second movement is a scherzo, often described as eerie, though Michael Kennedy, in his Master Musicians volume, says panic-stricken would be a better description – Britten had recently seen the Nazi death camps at the end of the Second World War. The finale, called Chacony, is a set of variations on a theme first given out by all the instruments in unison, with intervening cadenzas. The Emperors offers very eloquent playing and the scherzo is suitably haunting.
The rest of this first disc is given to early works. The Three Divertimenti are titled March, Waltz and Burlesque and are written with that breezy astringency which characterizes many of Britten’s earlier works. They are incisive little pieces, reminding me of Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for String Quartet, though I doubt whether Britten had heard these at the time. The Miniature Suite, of which this is the first recording is a set of four pieces. The first, Novelette, is a call to attention. The Menuetto is graceful and rather traditional. The Romanza is lyrical but very short and the final Gavotte is cheerful with one sombre moment. Britten wrote this when he was sixteen and it shows his extraordinary facility in composition even at that age.
The 1931 String Quartet in D is rather better-known and has been recorded several times. This is in three movements. The first is the most traditional, with an obvious debt to the Viennese masters. The slow second movement moves surprisingly close to the pastoral world of Vaughan Williams. The finale is a tarantella and includes a fugal passage in pizzicato. While the work is not yet fully mature, it is enjoyable and worth reviving.
The second disc contains the other two numbered quartets, with one other short piece between them. String Quartet No 1 was a commission from that notable patron of twentieth century string quartets, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, who had previously commissioned Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartók and many others. Britten had three months in which to write it. The first movement has an unusual structure: it opens Andante, with high chords and a pizzicato cello underneath. This alternates with an Allegro vivo with a dancing theme. I was reminded of the first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Op 109, which also alternates fast and slow sections. The second movement is marked Allegretto con slancio (with enthusiasm) and is a rather Shostakovich-like scherzo. The slow movement is in 5/4 and anticipates the Moonlight interlude in Peter Grimes. The finale is playful. This is a good work, which has been rather overshadowed by its two successors.
Between this and String Quartet No 3 we have the brief Alla marcia, which turns out to be a trial run for the Parade movement in Les Illuminations. It works surprisingly well as an independent piece.
The last quartet is also one of Britten’s last works. It is in five movements, each with a title. Duets alternates haunting chromatic phrases with jagged Bartókian passages. Ostinato is fast and furious, based on a four note motif. Solo is the opposite, marked ‘very calm’ and featuring the solo violin.and with cadenza-like passages. Burlesque is a scherzo with a fierce driving energy. The finale is marked Recitative and Passacaglia (La Serenissima). La Serenissima is Venice, and there are links with Britten’s last opera, Death in Venice. This is incredibly beautiful and moving and it fitly sums up Britten’s life work.
After this, the final disc returns us to early works. First, we have the Simple Symphony, written for either quartet or string orchestra and a real charmer. Of the four movements the Playful Pizzicato third is the stand-out number. The early Rhapsody is highly chromatic in a manner suggestive of the late romantics, or even early Schoenberg, an attractive but not a characteristic piece. The Quartettino is a fiercely concentrated short quartet – the same length as Bartók No 3 – in three movements and rather suggests Berg, with whom Britten at the time hoped to study. The Phantasy for string quintet adds a viola to the usual quartet and was written for the prize instituted by Walter Willson Cobbett for a one-movement work. This goes through several changes of mood and tempo but is uncharacteristically close to the kind of English rhapsodic writing Britten did not like. It won the prize and was performed and broadcast but Britten withdrew it. Finally we have the earliest of all these works, the String Quartet of 1928, written while Britten was still at school, and a highly competent work very much in the received tradition, with echoes of both Dvořák and Mendelssohn.
The Emperors bring energy, commitment, real understanding of the idiom and finesse to all these works. Perhaps they are more at home with the early works than with the final quartet, but that is a strange and hermetic work, and I found their performance compelling enough. These discs are SACDs, but I was listening in ordinary two-channel stereo, which still sounded fine. The booklets are helpful and I have drawn on them here and there.
There is, of course, a good deal of competition, depending on how much Britten for quartet you want. If you are interested only in the three numbered quartets, then the current front-runner is the Takács on Hyperion (review). The short-lived Britten quartet added the 1931 quartet to the three numbered ones; their two-disc set was last seen on Brilliant Classics. But if you want everything Britten wrote for the medium – and it is all worth hearing – then this set will do nicely.
Stephen Barber
Contents
String Quartet No 2 in C major Op 36 (1945)
Three Divertimenti (1936)
Miniature Suite (1929)
String Quartet in D major (1931 rev. 74)
String Quartet No 1 in D major Op 25 (1941)
Alla Marcia (1933)
String Quartet No 3 Op 94 (1976)
Simple Symphony Op 4 (1934)
Rhapsody (1929)
Quartettino (1930)
Phantasy in F minor for string quintet (1932)
String Quartet in F (1928)
Emperor Quartet members: Martin Burgess and Clare Hayes (violins), Fiona Bonds (viola), William Schofield (cello)
Help us financially by purchasing through
