Catalogue # CHAN10661

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Walton:
\nString Quartet 1922 (original version)
\nString Quartet in A Minor

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Doric String Quartet

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This new release represents one of the comparatively rare\nrecordings of the highly attractive string quartets by William\nWalton, one of England’s finest composers. The works are performed\nby the Doric String Quartet, exclusive Chandos artists and among\nthe youngest and most impressive quartets on the classical music\nscene today. Their recent release, of the string quartets by\nKorngold (CHAN10611), was given ‘Editor’s Choice’ in\nGramophone.

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Walton’s two string quartets, written about a quarter of a\ncentury apart, are barely recognisable as the work of the same\ncomposer. The String Quartet of 1922, an extraordinarily ambitious\nwork in terms of scale and technical demands, was written when\nWalton was in his late teens. The familiar Quartet in A minor is a\nwork of Walton’s maturity, more compact in form, conservative in\nlanguage, and relaxed in tone.

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When first performed, the String Quartet of 1922 was met with a\nlukewarm response, which led Walton to withdraw it and to make\nseveral substantial cuts to the material. When the work was\nrevived, a few years after his death, for performances and\nrecordings – including its premiere recording, on Chandos\n(CHAN8944, Gabrieli String Quartet) – these cuts were kept. This\nparticular recording, however, offers the full-length and original\nversion, as edited by Hugh MacDonald in 2008 for Oxford University\nPress’s William Walton Edition. Significantly, this quartet is for\nthe most part conspicuously lacking in the Stravinskyan constant\nchanges of time signature, which are such a prominent feature of\nthe later works by Walton. In the composer’s own words, this work\nis ‘full of undigested Bartók and Schoenberg’.

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It seems to have been in the late 1930s that Walton first agreed\nto write the String Quartet in A minor for the Blech Quartet (led\nby Harry Blech who later became the founding conductor of the\nLondon Mozart Players). But during the Second World War other\nprojects intervened, mainly scores for war-time propaganda films,\nand it was not until late 1944 that Walton started work on the\nquartet. The return to the string quartet genre did not come easily\nto Walton. As he wrote to a friend in 1945, ‘I’m in a suicidal\nstruggle with four strings and am making no headway whatsoever.\nBrick walls, slit trenches… I’m afraid I’ve done film music for too\nlong’.

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Despite his initial difficulty, the work gradually took shape,\nand Walton wrote to the same friend a short time later that he had\n‘captured a trench’ and ‘overcome some barbed wire entanglements’.\nThe String Quartet in A minor was completed in time for its\nsuccessful premiere in 1947 by the Blech Quartet in a chamber\nconcert on the BBC’s new Third Programme.

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