The "English Rarities" heard on this disc by the Griller Quartet, one of the top English chamber ensembles in the years before World War II, were the three prizewinners in a string quartet composition contest sponsored by the Daily Telegraph newspaper in 1933. Would today's Telegraph, or any American newspaper, do the same today? The winners got 78 rpm recordings of their works as part of the deal, but the recordings, as composition contest winners often will, bombed and disappeared from the catalog. One can both understand ...
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The "English Rarities" heard on this disc by the Griller Quartet, one of the top English chamber ensembles in the years before World War II, were the three prizewinners in a string quartet composition contest sponsored by the Daily Telegraph newspaper in 1933. Would today's Telegraph, or any American newspaper, do the same today? The winners got 78 rpm recordings of their works as part of the deal, but the recordings, as composition contest winners often will, bombed and disappeared from the catalog. One can both understand why and understand why they appealed to the judges (the otherwise informative notes don't mention who they were) in the first place -- they have clever ideas, like the jaunty, very British fugue that concludes the String Quartet, Op. 73, of Cecil Armstrong Gibbs, but there is no overriding sense of something that needed to be expressed. Pastoralism was in the air in English music at the time, and the most successful work of the three, Elizabeth Maconchy's Quintet for oboe and...
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