Bridge: String Quartets Nos. 1 And 3

Description

Frank Bridge (1879-1941)String Quartets Nos. 1 & 3Frank Bridge studied the violin and composition at the RoyalCollege of Music in London, where he was a pupil of Stanford from 1899 to 1903.Apart from composition, his career embraced performance as the viola player inseveral quartets, most notably the English String Quartet, conducting, in whichhe frequently deputised for Sir Henry Wood, and teaching, with Benjamin Brittenhis best-known pupil. Perhaps no other British composer of the first half ofthe century reveals such a stylistic journey in his music. His early works,such as the First String Quartet (1906), the Phantasy Piano Trio (1907) and theorchestral suite The Sea (1910-11), follow in the late-Romantic traditionbearing a kinship with Faure; subsequently, in the orchestral tone poem Summer (1914),for instance, Bridge comes close to the orbit of Delius. After the First WorldWar, however, his music became intense and chromatic as in the ScriabinesquePiano Sonata (1921-4). The radical language of the sonata was pursued in hischamber works of the 1920s, so that in the String Quartet No. 3 (1926) Bridgerubs shoulders with the early works of the Second Viennese School. Also to thisdecade belong two orchestral masterpieces, Enter Spring (1927) and Oration(1930). Finding little favour with public or critics, his late work, forexample the Fourth String Quartet (1934-8), languished and despite Britten'sadvocacy, it was not until the 1970s that Bridge's remarkable legacy receivedthe attention it deserved. At the outset of his career Bridge established his namethrough a series of chamber works in which he demonstrated impeccablecraftsmanship, and a wholly idiomatic understanding of string instruments, withthe viola, his own main instrument frequently having prominence. A furtherinfluence on the form of these works lay in the prizes instituted by WalterWilson Cobbett, an amateur musician whose interests were chamber music and theperiod of the Elizabethan and Jacobean composers. In particular he wasinterested in the instrumental 'fantasy' or 'phantasy' form of that time, inwhich several unrelated but varied sections formed the basis for an extendedwork. In 1905 Cobbett established a prize for chamber compositions in onemovement and Bridge submitted several works for his competitions, winning firstprize in 1907 and 1915. What was significant, though, was that Bridge adaptedaspects of the phantasy form within subsequent compositions, so that thematicunity within a work of one or several movements became a hallmark of hiscompositions. This is apparent in Bridge's First String Quartet, which waswritten in haste in the space of a month during 1906, in response to acompetition organized by the Accademia Filarmonica, Bologna, hence thequartet's sobriquet. Of the 67 quartets submitted only Bridge's received a'mention d'honneur'. He had had to work at such speed that there was no time tocopy a second set of parts, and it took the Accademia two-and-a-half years to