Frank Bridge - Bridge: Works for String Quartet [CD]

Frank Bridge (1879 -1941) Phantasie Quartet Novelletten Three Idylls An Irish Melody: Londonderry Air Sir Roger de Coverley Sally in Our Alley Cherry Ripe Three PiecesSince Frank Bridge's death in 1941 his music has been unduly neglected, although his name is at least recalled in the homage paid him by his pupil Benjamin Britten in his Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, using a theme from the second of the Three Idylls. Bridge was born in Brighton in 1879 and studied violin and composition at the Royal College of Music in London, continuing the latter study under Stanford. As a performer he established a place for himself as a violist, in particular in the English String Quartet, and as a conductor with the New Symphony Orchestra, at Covent Garden and in other important engagements with major orchestras in the English capital.As a composer Bridge developed a voice of some originality. A series of chamber works and songs won a ready public in the early years of the twentieth century, with larger scale orchestral compositions, symphonic poems and suites. His style developed in a radical way after the 1914-18 war, the change marked by his Piano Sonata, written between 1921 and 1924. The influence of Schoenberg's pupil Alban Berg becomes apparent, reminding us that Britten had once hoped to be allowed to study with Berg. Bridge, however, retains an English element in his harmony and musical language, although the new form that his music had taken isolated him from the insular traditions of many of his established contemporaries.The Phantasie Quartet, in F minor, was written in 1905 in response to Walter Wilson Cobbett, compiler of the useful Cyclopaedia of Chamber Music and an enthusiastic amateur violinist, owner of a Guadagnini instrument and other valuable violins. In 1905 he established a prize for a phantasy string quartet, analogous to the Elizabethan fancy or fantasy, a single-movement sectional work, then for consort of viols. The first quartet prize was won by W. Y. Hurlstone and Bridge won a prize in 1907 for his Phantasy Trio, while other winners included Armstrong Gibbs, Herbert Howells and John Ireland. Bridge entered his Phantasy Piano Quartet of 1910 for the same award. The essential element in the traditional form that Cobbett was seeking to encourage was the use of a single movement with related but contrasting sections.The first section of the F minor Quartet is marked Allegro moderato and opens emphatically before the march-1ike tread of the first theme, leading to idyllic music that must recall the contemporary idiom of Ravel in texture, contour and feeling, in particular the latter's Introduction and Allegro in its octave doublings of melody. The Andante moderato has stronger suggestions of English idiom in its opening, while the final section, Allegro ma non troppo, allows an element of romanticism that is remote from the world of Elizabethan consort