RELAXED CONCERT: THE LARK ASCENDING

Imogen Holst (1907-1984) composed her Phantasy String Quartet in 1928 (although it wasn’t premiered until several years after her death, in 2007). The piece typifies the composer’s early style, blending the English pastoral tradition with her own unique talents for melodic development, contrapuntal writing, and idiosyncratic quartet-textures. It won the Cobbet Prize – an award founded by the wealthy industrialist Walter Willson Cobbett to encourage composers to write ‘Phantasies’, works of one movement in the tradition of 16th and 17th-Century English ‘fancies’, ‘fantasies’, or ‘fantasias’. These were short instrumental works which, like Holst’s, did not adhere to strict forms but rather developed in their own imaginative and unexpected ways. Beginning with lush pastoral harmonies, Holst’s Phantasy transitions fluidly through episodes of meditative introspection and spirited energy. 

Henry Purcell (1659–1695) was one of the most celebrated English composers of the Baroque era. Among his remarkable works is a series of Fantasias (or Fancies), composed in 1680 when Purcell was only 21 years old. Showcasing his profound skill with contrapuntal writing – in which each of the instrument’s melodic lines work both independently and as part of the musical-whole – the Fantasias are considered among the finest examples of the form and are regarded by many to be the ‘jewel in the crown of English consort music’. This wasn’t always the case, however. When Purcell composed these works, the Fantasia was quite unfashionable. King Charles II is said to have had ‘an utter detestation of Fancys’. Out of favour in the Royal court, Purcell’s Fantasias were therefore likely intended to be performed in domestic settings. Originally written for three viols, they are here transcribed for string trio (violin, viola, and cello). 

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

Vaughan Williams began The Lark Ascending before the outbreak of the First World War, taking his inspiration from George Meredith’s 1881 poem of the same name. But he set this ‘Romance’ aside during the war and only finished it in 1920. The violinist Marie Hall gave the first performance of the original version for violin and piano in Shirehampton Public Hall (a district of Bristol) on 15 December 1920. Vaughan Williams dedicated the work to her, and she went on to give the premiere of the orchestral version six months later, when it was conducted by the young Adrian Boult at a concert in the Queen’s Hall in London. Free, serene and dream-like, this is idyllic music of rare and fragile beauty.

© Nigel Simeone