Given the plethora of musical riches at this year’s Britten Weekend it seems churlish to lament what was missing. After all, nobody sold this three-day festival as a completist event. Yet a work as substantial as the unnumbered String Quartet in D, written when the composer was 17 and rehabilitated by Britten himself in his final years, was a curious absentee from the party.
But what a swell party it was. Six concerts of Suffolk’s finest home-grown produce garnished with side orders of Mozart, Copland and Elgar (his Piano Quintet), plus a hefty serving of Korngold (the Piano Quintet and Piano Trio), nourished the ears and spirit. At their heart were gripping performances of Britten’s mature chamber works by the Doric String Quartet, four musicians of rare taste and virtuosity who were steeped in this repertoire on the back of a week spent recording them for Chandos.
From the early Three Divertimenti (the mercifully retitled attenuation of a more ambitious project Go play, boy, play) to the elaborate harmonies of his String Quartet no. 2 (1945), Britten’s progress as a chamber composer over less than a decade was charted with telling conviction. Yet the earliest work they included, the Phantasy Quartet of 1932, has a tremendous melodic verve all its own and, from John Myerscough’s creeping cello entry onwards, can rarely have been delivered with such lyrical freedom. There was an operatic tow born of confidence to this colourful quarter-hour.
Although the First String Quartet was composed during Britten’s US sojourn there is little of America within its pages. Whereas Dvořák’s New World adventures had been a celebration of discovery, Britten instead was wracked by a yearning for what was lost – a quality that would become a lifelong feature of his music. As a rule that would turn out to be childhood, but more plausibly on this occasion it’s the Englishness he’d left behind that troubled him. The four-movement work opens with an aching Sostenuto that not only inhabits the same emotional terrain as the Violin Concerto’s Passacaglia but also appears to quote two works as yet unwritten: the letter scene from The Turn of the Screw and God’s call from Canticle II, Abraham and Isaac.
The second movement’s instrumental tag games were a visual treat thanks to the players’ gleeful dips into vulgarity (just enough, never too much), and the Andante calmo third placed Alex Redington under the spotlight as the sweetest imaginable legato issued from his first violin. Britten’s finale, full of musical tickles early on, ended with an assertive display of harmonic brilliance that never lost sight of the music’s playfulness.
That future call to Abraham seemed to echo more strongly than usual in the Dorics’ scintillating account of the Second Quartet, where a similar motif closes the first movement. Not even divine intervention, though, could have prepared the listener for the group’s overwhelming account of the work’s closing Chacony, a 17-minute slow-burner that starts in fateful-sounding unison before fraying into threads that interlace with a searching need. It’s that yearning again, but here writ large. No wonder Britten waited 30 years after this before returning to the quartet form. The Doric players located the music’s elusive pulse and infused its every beat with virtuosic commitment, their instinct for drama intensifying as the score’s textures thickened and stretched. It was bravura playing.