Here we have a very welcome release by that most elusive of composers, William Alwyn (1905-1985). Known mostly for his nearly 200 film scores, Alwyn produced a number of works in all genres as well as teaching at the Royal Academy of Music (a post he accepted at the age of 21) for about 30 years. A literate man, he was very conscious of the ability of music to fulfill that which literature could not—to express the unsaid, and continue the conversation where words leave off.
He actually wrote thirteen early string works, and his first listed here is number fourteen. All of the practice did a world of good, for this work comes across as a fully mature, completely idiomatic piece that struggled to take its place in the middle of a time period where excessive aleatoric and experimental music was all the rage. Traditional in outline and scope, the piece nonetheless packs a strong emotional wallop and borrows much of its harmonic language from Debussy, though not in an “impressionistic” manner. The writing is no film music—while suggestive, and even evocative, the subject matter remains elusive, and the imagination of the hearer is given free reign.
At the age of 70 the composer took up his pen again for the second quartet, more reflective, anxious, yet at the same time more propulsive and animated. The harmonic language of Debussy, far from being in retreat, is even more insistent in this work, and Alwyn derives some of the bowing effects from Debussy’s quartet in his own language. The music is static in places, as if waiting for an unfinished reflection to gel into a concrete thought, but then moves on to another subject altogether. This is a brilliant work of great substance and meaning.
Alwyn’s last work of any merit was again to be a string quartet, this time his third. Any reservations from the previous quartet about age or entering the last stages of one’s life are gone here, and instead a rather life-affirming tone is set, not denying the reality of death, but refusing to give into it or see it as some kind of victor. The protagonist of this quartet, which has to be seen as the composer himself, is energetic and argumentative, not at all recessive and lethargic. Its two movement structures contain a number of tempo changes, and the closely held musical motives are cogently delivered in what must be ranked as one of Alwyn’s greatest and most successful works, indeed, as one of the best of the genre in the last century. His Three Winter Poems are lovely, subtly descriptive movements of delicacy and sweetness, perhaps the most overtly evocative pieces on the disc, and the earliest (1948).
The recording is excellent, as we have come to expect from Dutton, and the playing first-rate. Quartet lovers should rejoice!
— Steven Ritter
