String Quartet in One Movement: Score

Michael Berkeley

ISBN 10: 0193554933 ISBN 13: 9780193554931

The work was commissioned by the Gerald Finzi 25th Anniversary Celebration and was given its first performance by the Amici Quartet on 17 July 1981 at Ellesmere. On the same day it was given its premi�re by the Northern Ballet Theatre with the Amphion Quartet. The Quartet is risky in its use of a complex structure that unfolds unhurriedly -- ‘rhapsodically’ one might say on first acquaintance. Yet again the ideas are so striking and characterful that the listener is gripped immediately (there is, for example, an insouciant but sinister dance-music element whose final manifestation is as a slow, apparently luscious waltz; yet to describe how that lusciousness abruptly but inevitably curdles would be like giving away the end of a good detective story) and a second hearing begins to reveal how cunningly organized and logical the piece is. The influences (Bart�k and Shostakovich as well as Britten and a trace or two of Walton) are fully absorbed into a style which is authentically personal, the essential lyricism flowing all the more freely for the taut control that directs it. Michael Berkeley was born in 1948, the eldest son of the composer Sir Lennox Berkeley and a godson of Benjamin Britten and studied composition with his father and Richard Rodney Bennett. He worked in broadcasting while establishing an early reputation as an effective composer in a relatively conservative style. His Fantasia Concertante for small orchestra and Chamber Symphony gave evidence of richer and more progressive musical thinking, and his ability to explore important topics on a large canvas with no loss of dramatic intensity has been especially striking in Or Shall We Die?, an oratorio with an explicit anti-war message on a text by Ian McEwan, and the operas Baa Baa Black Sheep (Cheltenham, 1993) and Jane Eyre (Cheltenham, 2000). He was appointed a CBE for services to music in 2012 and in 2013 he was also appointed a non-party political member of the House of Lords.

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