EMR CD091 | DETAILS
  EMR CD091
   
 

BEAUTY VEIL’D
   
  Berkeley Ensemble
   
  EAN 5 060263 500858

This disc from the Berkeley Ensemble features the first-ever recording of Dorothy Howell’s long-lost String Quartet in D minor, a remarkable rediscovery brought back to life through the meticulous work of the ensemble’s own viola player, Dan Shilladay.

 

Howell’s single-movement quartet is a striking addition to the British chamber music repertoire. Performed probably just once in 1933 before being lost twice and nearly destroyed, its reconstruction from rough pencil sketches offers a vivid glimpse into the creative world of a composer once cheered by the popular press and championed by Proms conductor Henry Wood, but now largely forgotten.

 

The quartet forms the centrepiece of an ambitious new disc that also features four other première recordings of works by Howell and her circle. John Blackwood McEwen, her composition teacher at the Royal Academy of Music, is represented by his “Nugae”: Seven Bagatelles for String Quartet. These intimate, folk-tinged and beautifully crafted character pieces provide a perfect foil to Tobias Matthay’s Piano Quartet in One Movement, an ardent and virtuosic early work by Howell’s piano teacher and one-time friend of McEwen.

 

Howell and her near-contemporary Marie Dare probably never met, yet their lives followed a similar path from early acclaim as composer-performers to later obscurity. Dare’s darkly lyrical “Phantasy Quintet”, scored for string quintet with two cellos, echoes the same sumptuous late-Romantic language that condemned both composers to obscurity as modernism swept Europe in the wake of two World Wars. Howell’s own “Adagio and Caprice” for violin and piano completes the disc. Written in 1955, its quiet and dignified air of melancholy never found fame in a musical world that had moved abruptly on.

TRACK LISTING AND AUDIO EXTRACTS
     
Marie Dare (1902–1976)
1. “PHANTASY QUINTET”  
       
Dorothy Howell (1898–1982)
2. “ADAGIO AND CAPRICE” FOR VIOLIN AND PIANO  
3. STRING QUARTET IN D MINOR  
       
Tobias Matthay (1858–1945)
4. PIANO QUARTET IN ONE MOVEMENT, op. 20  
       
John Blackwood McEwen (1868–1948)
“NUGAE”: SEVEN BAGATELLES FOR STRING QUARTET
5. I. “Lament”  
6. II. “March of the Little Folk”  
7. III. “Peat Reek”  
8. IV. Scherzino  
9. V. Humouresque  
10. VI. “The Dhu Loch”  
11. VII. “Red Murdoch”  

 

REVIEWS
Beautifully shaped by Benjamin Frith... Beguiling sounds, graced by the tawny richness and unexaggerated line of Richard Jenkinson’s cello playing... The sense of purpose and sureness of line of Ian Venables’ music is pure oxygen.
EMR CD31 | BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
Exquisitely rewarding... Ravishing accounts.
EMR CD029 | CHOIR AND ORGAN
This is music of great beauty and integrity and the performances fully do it justice. It would be criminal to let it pass you by.

EMR CD028 | INTERNATIONAL
RECORD REVIEW

The Bridge Quartet approach these pieces with a sympathetic and insightful warmth, and confirm their ambassadorial credentials for British chamber music. A lovely, radiant disc.
EMR CD025 | Gramophone
Duncan Honeybourne’s playing is astonishingly affectionate, yet never saccharine... Honeybourne plays with suave confidence.
EMR CD024 | INTERNATIONAL PIANO
Rupert Marshall-Luck is an ideal interpreter: generously but not effusively lyrical; agile and athletic... The warm, folk-song like slow movement is at times almost painfully beautiful, with a shimmering pastoral central section... Marshall-Luck is, again, indefatigable and keenly picks up on the work’s melancholic strain.  Finely recorded and with comprehensive booklet notes, this is a must for fans of 20th-century English repertoire.
EMR CD023 | THE STRAD