Griller String Quartet - English Rarities (CD)

All Music Guide

The "English Rarities" heard on this disc by the Griller Quartet, one of the top English chamber ensembles in the years before World War II, were the three prizewinners in a string quartet composition contest sponsored by the Daily Telegraph newspaper in 1933. Would today's Telegraph, or any American newspaper, do the same today? The winners got 78 rpm recordings of their works as part of the deal, but the recordings, as composition contest winners often will, bombed and disappeared from the catalog. One can both understand why and understand why they appealed to the judges (the otherwise informative notes don't mention who they were) in the first place they have clever ideas, like the jaunty, very British fugue that concludes the String Quartet, Op. 73, of Cecil Armstrong Gibbs, but there is no overriding sense of something that needed to be expressed. Pastoralism was in the air in English music at the time, and the most successful work of the three, Elizabeth Maconchy's Quintet for ...oboe and strings, has a very convincing original folk tune it its final movement. Maconchy was influenced by Arnold Bax, whose String Quartet No. 1 in G major opens the disc and provides a counterpoint by a "name" composer to the music of the three contest entrants. Bax's quartet is a delightful work, filled with slightly offbalance allusions to Irish dances and folk songs; the Griller recorded it in a single take in the middle of World War II. Certainly this CD will be of interest to lovers of modern British music; even the Bax qualifies as a rarity, and the glimpse into Britain's public musical life of the 1930s is enjoyable enough for anyone. - James Manheim, All Music Guide Read more Less