Beauty Veil’d
Marie Dare (1902–1976)
Phantasy Quintet (1933-34)
Dorothy Howell (1898–1982)
Adagio and Caprice for Violin and Piano (1956)
String Quartet in D minor (1933)
Tobias Matthay (1858–1945)
Piano Quartet in One Movement Op.20 (1882 rev. 1905)
John Blackwood McEwen (1868–1948)
“Nugae” – Seven Bagatelles for String Quartet (String Quartet No.5)
The Berkeley Ensemble
Sophie McQueen (violin), Simon Callaghan (piano), Tom Wraith (cello)
rec. 2024, St. John the Evangelist, Oxford, UK
EM Records EMRCD091 [58]
September’s release schedule is a busy one for EM Records with three new discs coming my way bulging with typically intriguing and valuable repertoire. First off the pile is a disc titled “Beauty Veil’d” – which I assume is a quotation but one I do not recognise. The Berkeley Ensemble – a string quartet – is the core with musicians added or subtracted as each piece requires. The four composers represented are all known names though none could be termed “well-known” which is probably why all five works are receiving their world premiere recordings.
The collection opens with Marie Dare’s Phantasy [double cello] Quintet. Written in 1934 the liner note suggests this was one of the last works directly inspired by (but not written for) the famous W W Cobbett chamber music competitions of the preceding two decades. The goal of writing a compact single movement work in different distinct sections is admirably achieved here. Of course, even at its inception the Cobbett competitions were deliberately evoking a style and form of a much earlier age – in part intended to liberate British composers of the stranglehold of Germanic musical traditions. By the 1930’s this stranglehold had been considerably loosened so the liberating imperative of this phantasy form had diminished. But that is no reason not to celebrate this attractive and well-crafted work. Indeed “well-crafted” is a recurring theme of all of the works offered here.
There is a certain continuity of mood as well; lyrical and reflective, possibly even pensive that seems to chime with the “Beauty Veil’d title. Dare was a prize-winning cellist so no real surprise that the work is confidently and effectively laid out for the five instruments with the second cello line providing an extra strand of richness in the lower register. Most of Dare’s compositions were for chamber groupings and many reflect her Scottish roots; Scottish Rhapsody and Highland Ballad for Strings, Strathspey for Piano Trio, Three Highland Sketches for string quartet, [very attractive] and Hebridean Suite for cello and piano to name a few. This quintet is not explicitly folk-influenced but I did like the rather winsome jig that breaks out briefly around 3:35.
This shows the qualities of both the playing and the writing – neat, articulate played and clarity and an attractive light touch. This is music that is appealing to play and listen to while lacking any pretension or aspiration of grandeur. Take the very ending which after a last playful dance relaxes gently into restful quiet – hard not to be rather charmed by this unpretentious work.
Again those same qualities – and I really do consider conscious lack of pretension to be a considerable quality – recurs across the programme. Possibly only Tobias Matthay’s energetic and youthful Piano Quartet aspires to higher goals – rather successfully it has to be said. After the Dare we are offered two works by her near contemporary Dorothy Howell. Although hardly familiar, Howell’s music has experienced a recent renaissance yet to touch Dare’s work. Howell was something of a youthful sensation with her genuinely impressive tone poem Lamia performed multiple times at the Proms by Sir Henry Wood when the composer was just twenty-one. Like Dare, Howell was a fine performer – the piano was her instrument and with a neat piece of programming synergy she was a keyboard pupil of Matthay, a composition pupil of McEwen and spent much of her later career as professor of harmony and composition at London’s Royal Academy of Music where she had studied herself.
Duton released a very attractive survey of her chamber music about twenty years ago which curiously does not appear to have been reviewed on MWI. If Dare was willing to embrace hints of folk music, Howell does not. Indeed on occasions there is a near-objective neo-classicism to her writing which again benefits from her considerable effective economy of writing. The 1955 Adagio and Caprice for violin and pianois genuinely impressive as much for its economy of musical gesture as anything. The liner booklet is slightly confusing as to which of the violinists of the Berkeley Ensemble plays this work. Francesca Barritt has an asterisk against her name but that then appears adjacent to the Howell String Quartet – online stores list Sophie McQueen as the solo violinist. Whatever the truth of that, they play well with an attractive floated and unforced tone that suits this slightly ethereal and elusive work. The two sections – offered here as a single track – are well contrasted with the gentle melancholy of the Adagio balanced by a skittish Caprice which has a light, near continuous, spinning top energy. The violist of the Ensemble Dan Shilladay writes the liner making the comment that by 1955 this music was “considered hopelessly old-fashioned in a post-war musical world. The ‘problem’ for Howell is that for all its many musical virtues, within its chosen musical vernacular it is just a fraction faceless. Compare to the near(ish) contemporary Two Pieces for Violin and Piano by Walton and you find a similar aesthetic, rendered with equal technical and expressive precision but simply greater individuality and personality. McQueen[?] is well supported by the ever-excellent Simon Callaghan on piano who continues to impress whenever new recordings of his emerge. His disc alongside piano-duet colleague Hiroaki Takenouchi on Lyrita which I reviewed enthusiastically included three brief Howell works. Given that there is an unrecorded[?] but rather lovely Minuet for string quartet by Howell this choice of a violin and piano work in a collection of chamber ensemble works is something of an outlier.
The second Howell work is a string quartet which dates from 1933. Violist Dan Shilladay was responsible for very effectively reconstructing this score – I have done similar things myself and it is a lot of work! The result is a single movement that here plays for 9:17. There was a 1933 private premiere but then the work was literally “lost whilst on loan to a forgetful violinist”. What is not clear from the liner is whether the movement offered here is the complete work as performed in 1933 or all the manuscript sketches that have survived. To my ear it has a ‘first movement’ feel (the liner mentions “the shadow of a sonata allegro”) and given the quality of the music – Shilladay has done a thoroughly idiomatic and expert reconstruction that is very realised by he and his colleagues – the sense of “movements missing” is tantalising. Again the sense of very well crafted music, effectively laid out is marked. This is more restless and has a darker mood than Dare’s work – the closely voiced figurations hint at Moeran’s style of writing I thought. Howell’s music is distinctively British while not relying on folksong there is a certain pastoral openness to her writing that I find very attractive.
For anyone interested in the origins of “The English Musical Renaissance” the name of Tobias Matthay will be a familiar one. But not as a composer but rather a piano teacher of wide and enduring influence. A partial list of pupils reads like a who’s-who of British pianism of the early 20th Century; York Bowen, Myra Hess, Clifford Curzon, Harold Craxton, Moura Lympany, Eileen Joyce, Harriet Cohen, Dorothy Howell, the duo Bartlett and Robertson. And not forgetting composer Arnold Bax. But I do not think I have ever heard a work of Matthay’s own composition. Here we have the impressive and compact Piano Quartet in One Movement Op.20 which lasts a cogent 12:54. The original version dates from 1882 when Matthay was just 24 years old. This is music that leaps confidently from the page. The usual European ‘influences’ of Brahms and Dvořák are easily discerned but not to a degree that swamps Matthay’s own voice. Perhaps what is more striking is – once again – the evident compositional skill deployed. Themes are powerfully and clearly defined and how they develop and transform are impressively cogent. There are many other British scores from the early 1880’s that lack this kind of muscular authority. The playing here is again very good with Simon Callaghan’s piano well balanced within the ensemble. Interesting that the liner notes the influence of Liszt. The Wiki article includes a list of compositions which includes a symphony – but all appear to have been written before the age of thirty – Matthay was promoted to professor of piano at the RAM in 1884 from which point on pedagogy rather than composition took priority. But certainly on the strength of this work I would be interested to hear more of the early compositions.
John Blackwood McEwen was another who chose to primarily teach rather than compose. However, McEwen did continue composing in an almost ‘private’ manner thereby fulfilling the urge to create without the associated pressures and expectations large-scale commissions might bring. A great sorrow was that the cycle of McEwen string quartets started by The Chilingirian Quartet on Chandos stalled at volume 3 with at least nine quartets (of nineteen – as listed on the musicalitalics.com website) unrecorded. My major reason for requesting this disc was to hear one of those ‘missing’ nine. This is Nugae – Seven Bagatelles for String Quartet (No.5 according to musicalitalics – although they give the composition as 1912 it was not published until 1917). This work is a really good example of a near-lost ‘sub-genre’ of quartet – the suite. Think a kind of latter day Grieg Lyric Pieces for quartet. “Nugae” translates as trifles – the liner offers “jokes” as an alternative but in the context of this work the music is not at all comic but it is consciously miniature and/or slight. Yet the inconsequentialness of “trifles” does this music and its composer a disservice. All of the music on this disc is good and enjoyable but this suite is a cut above the rest. Simply because in these limited scale works – the longest movement just 3:12 – McEwen combines compositional flair with a genuine ability to write effective mood-music in a concentrated and economical format. Two of the movements are pictorial tone poems; Peet Reek and The Dhu Loch two are abstract novelties; Scherzino and Humoresque. This leaves the opening impressively economical Lament, a twinkling March of the Little Folk and the closing Red Murdoch which is a spirited skirling Scottish dance. A further skill is that while each movement works perfectly in isolation, the full set of seven is even more satisfying in its totality. The liner rightly points to the penultimate The Dhu Loch as a fine example of McEwen writing both in its focussed expression but also skilled handling of four essentially quite simple musical lines.
At least two more of the published McEwen quartets fall within the ‘suite’ categerisation; No.10 The Jocund Dance (another fun score!) and No.12 Suite of National Dances. Both are consciously lighter works – Nugae contains the finer music – but certainly both deserve to be heard. The Berkeley Ensemble is to be praised for the commitment of time and effort to prepare this whole disc. The playing is very good although possibly lacking that last scintilla of polish the very finest ensembles can achieve. If you come away from a disc of unknown music such as this wanting to hear more by all of the composers represented then it is mission accomplished. That is certainly the case here – perhaps the Berkeley Ensemble is the group to complete what the Chilingirians started?
Nick Barnard
Other review: Jonathan Woolf
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