Doreen Carwithen: String Quartet No.1 (1945)

Allegro moderato
Lento
Allegro

To a confirmed Cornishman, it long ago came as a huge disappointment that this distinguished composer’s surname (originating from the north eastern part of the county) had no bearing on her place of birth – although her 1952 overture Bishop Rock, depicting a magnificent lonely lighthouse, five miles to the west of the Isles of Scilly, might suggest more than a passing interest in the far south west. In fact, she was born in Haddenham, Buckinghamshire, where her father ran a bakery and a grocery shop. However, her mother was a fine pianist and music teacher, with whom both Doreen and her younger sister Barbara took violin and piano lessons from a very early age. Both girls proved to be highly talented, and both dabbled in composing: Doreen – aged 16 – with a setting of Wordsworth’s much-loved poem I wandered Lonely as a Cloud. Three years later, she enrolled at the Royal Academy of music, soon joining a student string quartet there as cellist, but it was not until 1945 that she actually composed a quartet, which was awarded an Alfred Clements Prize for chamber music three years later. Indeed, No.2 (1950) was to receive the even more prestigious Cobbett Award. 

Despite an impressive catalogue of orchestral and chamber works, her destiny eventually became the cinema; in all, she wrote music for over thirty films, achieving recognition with her contribution to the official coverage of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953. Over the years she had maintained contact with her composition professor at the Royal Academy, William Alwyn, becoming his personal secretary in 1961 – and his second wife in 1975. He himself wrote music for even more films than his new bride, such that she ended up sacrificing her own composing in order to be his amanuensis – although eventually returning to the Academy as a professor of composition. 

Her first quartet proves to be an exceptionally accomplished work, unjustly neglected until recorded by the Sorrel Quartet in 1998.  The gently rhapsodic opening movement is followed by a deeply elegiac Lento, graced early on by a duet between violin and cello embracing hypnotic oscillations from the middle parts. The lively – yet at times shadowy – finale features much resourceful and evocative use of quartet texture, eventually racing to a hair-raising conclusion via imaginative use of sul ponticello tremolando. 

© Alan George
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