Emperor Quartet BRITTEN String Quartet in F - Simple Symphony - Rhapsody - Phantasy - Quartettino

For this final disc in the series, the Emperor Quartet have gathered five works from the composer's earliest period, from the String Quartet in F, by a fourteen-year old schoolboy, to the Simple Symphony, composed six years later and the work which may be regarded as his breakthrough.

As discussed in the insightful liner notes by the musicologist Arnold Whittall, these compositions demonstrate how the young Britten developed a personal style of his own. (Presto Classical)

“With the Emperor Quartet's quick reactions, the [Simple Symphony] takes on a new guise in this intimate form, at once spikily alive in the outer movements and confiding of private secrets at the heart of the 'Sentimental Sarabande'...these youthful pieces repay one's attention.” (Gramophone)

Emperor Quartet BRITTEN String Quartet No. 2 - 3 Divertimenti - Miniature Suite - String Quartet in D

The Emperor Quartet follows the most substantial of Britten's three numbered quartets with three of the quartet works that preceded them. Both the Three Divertimenti of 1936 and the D major Quartet are relatively well known, but this is the first recording of the Miniature Suite, composed in 1929 when Britten was 16. It's a succession of genre pieces – novelette, minuet, romanza and gavotte – but apart from a precocious fluency, none of them reveals much of the future composer. The Emperor Quartet play all three with the right mix of witty insouciance and technical accomplishment, but the group reveals its true colours in the Second Quartet. (The Guardian)

Emperor Quartet BRITTEN String Quartets Nos. 1 & 3 - Alla Marcia

This release by Britain's Emperor Quartet (nothing like dreams of empire) follows on an earlier Benjamin Britten album containing the composer's String Quartet No. 2 and a group of early works. If anything, the present release places even greater demands on the ensemble, which responds in fine style. The String Quartet No. 1 in D major, Op. 25, and the String Quartet No. 3, Op. 94, are separated by three decades and a major chunk of stylistic development in Britten's career. The first quartet, written in the U.S. and premiered in Los Angeles in 1941, features a limpid songlike slow movement and a complex opening movement that seems deftly to balance tempos and tonalities. Especially in its Shostakovich-like Allegretto con slancio ("with enthusiasm"), the work has a fair amount of humor, considering the world-historical situation of the time and its direct effect on Britten's career: he had determined for professional reasons to return to Britain, and a trans-Atlantic crossing in 1941 took a good deal of nerve. The String Quartet No. 3, from 1975, was one of Britten's last works, and it inhabits a stylistic world different from almost all the rest of his music: that of Mahler and his closest successor, Zemlinsky. The transcendent slow Passacaglia that closes the work makes a beautiful capstone to Britten's chamber music career, and the soaring lines of its dissonant counterpoint are rendered in sterling detail by BIS' engineers, working in the ideal space of Britain's Potton Hall. Britten's quartets do not have the immediately accessible quality of his larger choral and operatic works, but they are cut from the same cloth, and this British release and its companion make an excellent place to start with them. (James Manheim)