The Carducci Quartet have a pretty adventurous pedigree witness
their catalogue:
• Joseph Horovitz - Fantasia and Quartets with
Nicholas Daniel (oboe) Carducci Classics CSQ6482
• Graham Whettam - Quartets with Jennie-Lee
Keetley (oboe) Carducci
Classics CSQ5847
• Philip Gates - A Garland for Gatsby
with Andrew Knights (oboe); Philip Gates (piano) Melodist
3130CD
• Philip Glass - String Quartets 1-4 Naxos
8.559636
They now extend their coverage to Brian Boydell. The music
of this Irish composer is worth more than a passing audition.
Fortunately a range of discs, modest in number, allows closer
acquaintance. The 1954 Violin Concerto and In Memoriam Mahatma
Gandhi, Masai Mara and Megalithic Ritual Dances
played by Maighread McCrann (violin) with Colman Pearce conducting
the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland are on Marco Polo
8.223887 (we could do with a review of this if anyone has a
copy). Boydell studied at the RCM in London with Patrick Hadley
and Herbert Howells (1938-45) then with John Larchet himself
a gifted composer, in Dublin.
The Second Quartet was premiered in 1959. Its two movements
sing through a delicate interlace of ecstatically pastoral material.
Rather than his declared models of Bartók, Sibelius and
Mahler it is Patrick Hadley I hear in this lovely work. The
breathtaking quietude of the end of the first movement suggests
some unspeakably beautiful vision only capable of articulation
through music. The second movement is more spiky - almost jazzy.
The Third Quartet is in one longish movement. It was first aired
by the RTE String Quartet in 1970. Neither of its predecessors
evince avant-garde credentials. This however has a chilly and
thorny essence on display. That said it is not without an infusion
of lyrical succulence. Nowhere is Boydell as ‘extreme’
as Mátyás Seiber in his masterly Third Quartet
"Lirico". Boydell's music seems benevolently caught between
the poles represented by Berg's Lulu and Warlock's Curlew.
The work ends in an echo of Beethovenian defiance.
Boydell’s First Quartet was premiered in Dublin in February
1952 by the Cirulli Quartet. It too has its Curlew moments
but it is tougher than I had expected. The complexity of the
textures has probably hampered its progress. However when these
thin out, as in the pensive melancholy at the end of the first
movement, things improve. The central Allegro Selvaggio
is athletic radiating some ingratiatingly lyrical tendrils.
The long final Allegro (Adagio) has vitality but
there is a severity there too though it's most poetically rounded
out in a manner that looks forward to the wonderful end of the
first movement of the Second Quartet. Gareth Cox, who provides
the liner-note, tells us that in this work Boydell began to
leave behind the too obvious influences of RVW, Sibelius and
Bartok. I certainly agree.
The Adagio and Scherzo was premiered by the work's dedicatees,
the Degani Quartet on the occasion of the 1992 quatercentenary
celebrations for Trinity College, Dublin. It was finished on
time in 1991. It's another diptych this time from the latest
chapter of the composer's career. That Bergian Curlew-despair
throws deep shadows as well as intimations of a tender nocturnal
beauty.
The urgent attention of admirers of Boydell's music and of twentieth
century string quartets in general is drawn to this disc. Boydell
creates a distinctive and very beautiful realm but is by no
means facile of access.
Rob Barnett
Carducci Quartet (Matthew Denton (violin); Michelle Fleming (violin);
Eoin Schmidt-Martin (viola); Emma Denton (cello)) rec. Highnam church,
Gloucestershire, UK. 2008. DDD 
