Britten’s Phantasy Op.2 is subtitled ‘Quartet in one movement for oboe, violin, viola and violoncello’. It was composed in September and October 1932 and first performed in a BBC broadcast on 6 August 1933. The oboe was played by the work’s dedicatee, Léon Goossens, with the International String Quartet. Britten was still a student at the Royal College of Music, but the individuality and ingenuity of his music is already strongly apparent. In 1934 the Phantasy was performed at the Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music in Florence. Unlike a number of other British composers, Britten was quickly recognised as an outstanding talent abroad as well as at home, and this 1934 performance marked the arrival of an important new voice in European music. It did so in trying circumstances: the concert was half an hour late starting, and when Goossens and the Griller Quartet were about to begin, there was, according to the Musical Times, ‘a further delay – to silence an orchestra that was rehearsing in an adjoining room’.

The Phantasy is a single movement designed in an arch form: a central section framed by a spiky and ghostly march in which the cello introduces the dotted rhythms that were such an individual feature of Britten’s music. The central section is marked Allegro giusto, intercut with interludes, one of which is for strings alone. This gives the oboist a rest before a slower cadenza-like passage in which the oboe plays florid, wide-ranging phrases over long, sustained notes. At the close, the dotted march returns, at first triumphant, with multiple-stopped string chords, before reverting to the tense, mysterious mood of the opening.

© Nigel Simeone 2015