‘To my mind it is the greatest advance I have yet made’. These were Benjamin Britten’s words to Mary Behrend, who commissioned his second string quartet in 1945. The first quartet had been written in the Californian sunshine four years earlier, and the world would have to wait another three decades until Britten composed his third and final quartet, with its poignant references to Venice. So this work stands at a crucial centre point, geographical, temporal, and cultural, in the development of Britain’s greatest composer since Henry Purcell.
Why was Britten’s pronouncement upon this work so confident, strident even? After all, this was the composer who had successfully re-established himself in Britain after spending the first years of World War II in America, recently completed brilliant innovatory works such as the Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings, and who’d just achieved huge success with his opera Peter Grimes.
So it’s a fascinating reflection on the character of the composer that it was here, in the intimate, contemplative medium of the string quartet that Britten felt he was able to make such an effective compositional statement. And it was here also that Britten pays one of his many tributes to a great musical hero, Henry Purcell. Yet more recent factors might also have influenced this fascinating, ambiguous work – Britten had recently returned from a visit to Germany, where he had performed to survivors of the Belsen concentration camp. Such is the extraordinary range of influences that informs this music.
The first of the quartet’s three movements is a brilliant, concise experiment in sonata form, powerfully manipulated by Britten into something altogether more restless and adventurous. After that is the Vivace – an intense, hectic burst of music that many have observed makes reference to a composer who would become a close friend of Britten’s – Dmitri Shostakovich. And finally there’s a Chacony – a clear allusion to the sound-world of Purcell refracted through a twentieth century lens, in which groups of variations, punctuated by cadenzas for cello, viola, and first violin, are built upon a bass pattern or ‘ground’.
Benjamin Britten’s Second String Quartet was first performed by the Zorian Quartet at London’s Wigmore Hall on the 250th anniversary of Henry Purcell’s death, the 21st of November 1945.
Here, filmed by Plushmusic on the closing day of the 2009 HSBC Cheltenham Music Festival, the work is performed by The Barbirolli Quartet. A young British string quartet that has already established a reputation for a dynamic approach to performance of diverse repertoire, The Times has called them ‘forthright, full-blooded musicians, afraid of nothing’; while The Strad magazine praised their ‘superbly realised performance’ and ‘precision of ensemble at formidable rates of energy’. Here a packed Pittville Pump Room gave them a warm welcome, and departed happy to have heard such an exciting interpretation of one of the great British string quartets of the twentieth century.
Lyndon Jones
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