Arnold Cooke (1906-2005)
Complete String Quartets Volume 2
String Quartet No.4 (1976)
Variations on an Original Theme (1945)
String Quartet No.2 (1947)
Bridge Quartet
rec. 2024/25, St George’s, Pinner View, Harrow, UK
Toccata Classics TOCC0777 [69]

Arnold Cooke’s string quartets conclude with volume 2 of Toccata’s pioneering series. The earlier volume appeared in 2023. This one contains the Second and Fourth quartets, and the Variations on an Original Theme. Though they’re programmed 4 and 2, bisected by the Variations, it makes sense to consider them chronologically.

The Variations was composed whilst Cooke was serving in the Royal Navy on a tug patrolling the Thames in 1945. In his typically knowledgeable notes Peter Marchbank cites Cooke authority Harvey Davies, who believes the composer was ‘keeping his hand in’, and that the composition was a kind of exercise with no prospect of a performance in mind. Its first performance was therefore given by the Bridge Quartet in 2023 and they perform it with aplomb. Its supple themes are easy-going but never simplistic, each variation is neatly characterised, even the very short ones – and even the March that lasts a minute or so – before Cooke ends on a fugal note. The fugue is a recurring feature of these quartet finales, not always, I think, to the works’ advantage.

Quartet No.2 followed two years later, in 1947, and is a robust, traditionally structured four-movement work. After a traditionally-minded sliver of an Adagio introduction, the work moves up several gears and whilst the influence of Hindemith – almost inevitable when discussing Cooke – is never so far away, the full-scale Scherzo has zest and thematic quality, just as the ensuing slow movement enjoys space, contrast – some warmly lyric, others austere – and a satisfying feeling of completeness. The finale is deftly terpsichorean but in one of those ‘everything stops for tea’ moments, everything stops for a fugue in a richly contrapuntal context.

Cooke’s Fourth Quartet was written in 1976 when he was 70. There was one more to come, the radically-compressed Fifth of 1978. The Fourth, though, still conforms to a four-movement expansive format lasting some 22 minutes in this performance. Clear-cut and contrapuntal. it also seems in its Scherzo to enshrine little folkloric elements – sprightly, rhythmic and engaging. Weight falls on the Adagio, the longest movement, which is quietly withdrawn and intense and rather impressive. The finale is spruce, attractive and, yes, fugal in part. As so often in his chamber music there’s a sense of space in Cooke’s writing – it’s crisp and clean, if sometimes a touch reserved.

Once again, the Bridge Quartet prove splendid ambassadors for Cooke’s quartet works, attentive to his variety of moods, his wryness and wintry moments and all points between. The acoustic is apt and not inflated and the whole production serves Cooke’s muse with dedication.

Jonathan Woolf

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