![]() Even when I can't specifically cite why - which, sad to say, is a lot of the time, as my motif-recognition skills rather suck - the music at any given point always "sounds" strongly related to the rest of the music nothing comes across as extraneous or gratuitous or out of place. What makes the work go is the sheer vigor and intellectual rigor of Bridge's development - this is one highly wrought, organic piece of music. Just as some themes are naturally well-suited to fugal development, some thematic material is naturally well-suited to the kind of development Bridge employs here, or so I'm guessing. Bridge chooses his thematic material very shrewdly in order to maximize the harmonic possibilities and give himself lots of room to expand and develop this is very important, as the work is based entirely on thematic material (all manner of motifs) introduced in the slow introduction and at very start of the main Allegro section of the first movement. It's with tonality and harmonics that Bridge breaks with tradition: it's chromatic, with all twelve tones and a lot of dubious harmonies revolving around a nebulous C-major tonal center. The work is laid out and structured traditionally enough, having a sonata-allegro first movement, an intermezzo second, and a sonata-rondo third/final. Endellion String Quartet or Maggini Quartet ~ This is the highlight of Bridge's one-man English Expressionism movement of the 1920s and '30s and one of my favorite English or Expressionist string quartets of any decade. ![]() ![]() This work is more strange than good, but it's interesting and perversely likable nonetheless.įrank BRIDGE: String Quartet No. Some darkly repetitive, rather sinister-sounding episodes also get in the way, but the chorale manages to persevere and reassert itself at work's end, a bit worse for the wear. The strangeness continues in the third/final movement, as a mock grand chorale/hymn tune comes down with a bad case of Janacek fever: the chorale tries to maintain its dignity and continue nobly on, but it keeps getting interrupted by tempestuous outbursts of the kind found in Janacek's string quartets. The humorously haunted tea-party music itself could be the theme for some Wodehouse-esque British sitcom from the '70s or '80s, while the ominous intrusions from the underworld might sound at home in a particularly scary episode of Doctor Who. ![]() Things quickly get strange and surreal in the brief scherzo second movement, wherein a small portal to Hell tries to open in the middle of a tea party in Schubert's garden indeed, the diabolical cello pizzicato-playing at movement's end seems to be ushering Schubert and his friends down a stairway to Hell. The relatively sane sonata-based first movement takes fairly Romantic thematic material and treats it in a fairly modern way that sounds a bit like streamlined Bartók.
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