Australian-born
and New Zealand-raised Alfred Hill has long held an important
place in Antipodean musical life. A substantial biography by
John Mansfield Thomson exists and recordings have attested to
his pioneering place in the culture of his native land(s). With
the release of this budget label disc devoted to the first three
quartets – the entire corpus of Hill’s quartets is to be released
in due course by Naxos– the wider public can get to know him
more as a composer and less as a footnote.
The First Quartet
is a student work and my date of 1889-1897 in the head note is
very loose; this relates to the commencement of the work during
his Leipzig days and the subsequent post-1896 replacement of the
two inner movements to incorporate some “Maori” ideas. He’d certainly
immersed himself in the quartet repertoire when in Germany and
was seemingly intent on cribbing from Dvořák and adding some
Borodin and fusing it with mid-century, maybe Mendelssohnian warmth.
The second movement has a nice trio and a rather cocky profile
though it still cleaves to Bohemian models with plenty of folkloric
drive (hard to define as at all Maori) and the finale has a coquettish
turn of phrase that amuses. Its rather winsome dance opens out
into a broad folkloric panel. The playing is committed but uneven.
Intonation wanders and ensemble is not always watertight.
The Second Quartet
dates from 1907-11. Once again the influence is Dvořák, not
the perhaps expected heavy-duty Brahms. The narrative sense of
the work is more convincing than the earlier work’s barely assimilated
models. The pizzicato woodpecker for instance is appealing, a
little naïve maybe, but still full of felicitous colour. The
second movement however has a sparse, reflective, rather dreamlike
intimacy of expression and manages to embrace atmospheric expression
in to the bargain. The finale is vibrant, exciting and much more
clearly and analytically thought through than the finale of the
student quartet.
A couple of years
after having finished the G minor he finished the Third Quartet
subtitled The Carnival. It was expanded many years later
in the 1955 Carnival Symphony [No.5] – Hill is probably still
best known for his symphonic and operatic writing. It has some
very beautiful moments, lyric and intense, but also the expected
rusticities of Dvořák – note the way the cello pizzicati
underpins so much of the verdency of this kind of writing; and
the wheezy articulation that generates the folk hues. The finale
sails close to Bohemian and Russian music, songful, eventful and
with Hill whipping up a fine dance to end the quartet with real
fire.
The recorded sound
is generally good and the performances, as noted, occasionally
wayward – though that’s mainly confined to the First Quartet.
I’ve not heard any rival recordings of these three quartets but
it will be interesting to see how the Dominion shapes up against
the Australian Quartet [Marco Polo 8.223746] in the Fifth, Sixth
and Eleventh.
Jonathan Woolf
Dominion Quartet
