Richard Flury (1896-1967)
Chamber Music Volume One
String Quartet No.1 in F minor (1926)
String Quartet No.2 in C major (1940)
Colla Parte Quartet
rec. 2021, SRF Radio Studio, Brunnenhof, Zurich (No.1); 2022, Reformed Church, Oberbalm, Canton Bern (No.4)
Toccata Classics TOCC0712 [56]

Richard Flury had a long relationship with the string quartet. He wrote seven mature works for the medium, the last in 1964, a few years before his death, and as a violinist he knew the medium from the inside. 

The first volume in Toccata’s chamber music series focuses on String Quartets No.1 (1926) and No.4 (1940). They share a four-movement form and traditional values. There are no outré gestures, nothing to disturb the genial and rather mellifluous direction of the music and little, to be honest, that adds necessary grit. That said, if you appreciate Flury you’ll enjoy these quartets as they encode a sense of humour – genial not wintry – and that’s not an everyday occurrence. The F minor shows that quality in its first movement and in the second movement wandering harmonies are a feature of the writing, as is a rich warmth. The scherzo has vitality and rather more character than the slow movement and the finale sports a contrapuntal march that accelerates to the finish line.   

The Fourth Quartet has a rather unusually expanded opening Allegro. The eloquent booklet writer Chris Walton, who has written a book on the composer, points out the Brucknerian influence. The music lightens through, and characteristically becomes jollier, before exuding a ripe late-Romanticism which is one of Flury’s distinguishing compositional features.  A chorale dominates the slow movement and the scherzo has all the necessary contrasts. The finale is a lively movement with some insouciant waltz episodes.

These are premiere recordings so this is the only disc in town. I feel about Flury’s string quartets much as I did about his violin and other orchestral music (review), which is that they’re well-crafted, very approachable and enjoyable but lacking a sense of personality. Or, perhaps, that the personality isn’t ‘public’ and the ethos is a more collegiate one. It is almost as if Flury, a jobbing violinist for most of his life, was content to write for the medium without any overt concern for showiness or even public performance. Perhaps it’s telling that the First Quartet was the only one published in his lifetime and that the Fourth seems not to have received many performances.  

The Colla Parte Quartet was founded in 1997 by musicians from the Bern Symphony and plays with sensitive understanding of Flury’s essentially undemanding ambitions. The First was recorded in the studio, the Fourth in a church, but producer Gerald Hahnefeld ensures there’s no incongruity between the two acoustics. 

Jonathan Woolf

Help us financially by purchasing from