Elizabeth Maconchy, William Walton

condition (record/cover): NM / EX 

The essential document of Elizabeth Maconchy's achievement as a quartet composer - and a work of the highest importance in the history of British chamber music. Maconchy wrote thirteen string quartets over a period of more than fifty years, and they constitute, taken together, one of the most sustained and serious bodies of quartet writing in the twentieth century: a lifelong exploration of the genre's formal and expressive possibilities conducted with a consistency of purpose and a command of the medium's resources that invite comparison with the great Central European quartet traditions. The works on this Argo LP - drawn from the middle years of the cycle - display the characteristic combination of motivic density, harmonic astringency, and formal intelligence that made her reputation in the few circles where her music received the attention it deserved.

William Walton's String Quartet in A minor (1945-47) provides the coupling - a work whose complexity and emotional weight has been consistently underestimated, a quartet that takes the late Romantic inheritance seriously and subjects it to a kind of post-war pressure that gives the music its particular unresolved tension. Together, Maconchy and Walton on this Argo pressing constitute an argument for British chamber music as a tradition of genuine depth. Argo, ZRG 5329.