Phantasy Quartet

Phantasy Quartet, Op. 2, is the common name of a piece of chamber music by Benjamin Britten, a quartet for oboe and string trio composed in 1932. In the composer's catalogue, it is given as Phantasy, subtitled: Quartet in one movement for oboe, violin, viola, violoncello.^[1][2] It was first performed in August 1933 as a BBC broadcast.

History

Britten composed Phantasy Quartet at age 18 as a student at the Royal College of Music,^[3] after his first work to which he assigned an Opus number, the Sinfonietta for chamber orchestra.^[4] He dedicated it to the oboist Léon Goossens, who played the first performance in a BBC broadcast on 6 August 1933,^[3][5] with members of the International String Quartet.^[3] The same players performed the concert premiere in London on 21 November that year. On 5 April 1934, it was performed in Florence for the International Society of Contemporary Music,^[3] as the first piece to win the composer international recognition.^[4]

Music

The music is in the form of a 16th-century fantasy, in an arch form with elements from the sonata form. As in Mozart's Oboe Quartet, the oboe has a solo function.^[3] The duration is given as 15 minutes.^[2]

It has been called "consummately crafted".^[4] The music grows out of silence and in the end returns to it in symmetry. The first theme is a march, marked molto pianissimo,^[4] with the cello beginning on the fingerboard of a muted cello, followed by viola, violin and finally the oboe.^[6] The theme becomes later also the source of themes in a fast section, similar to the development section of the sonata form. In the slow middle section, the strings alone introduce a theme in which the oboe joins. It is followed, in symmetry, by a recapitulation of the fast section, and then the march. The musicologist Eric Roseberry summarises: "If the pastoral slow section echoes the leisurely folkiness of an Englishry that Britten had not yet entirely rejected, the Phantasy as a whole generates a tension and harmonic grittiness which are harbingers of a less complacent outlook."^[4]

Recordings

A recording by oboist François Leleux with Lisa Batiashvili, Lawrence Power and Sebastian Klinger combines the quartet with Mozart's oboe quartet and other chamber music by the two composers.^[6]

References

External links

• Mary Lindsey Campbell Bailey: Léon Goossens’s Impact on Twentieth-century English Oboe Repertoire: Phantasy Quartet of Benjamin Britten, Concerto for Oboe and Strings of Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Sonata for Oboe of York Bowen (Dissertation, University of Cincinnati) ohiolink.edu 24 May 2010
• Benjamin Britten (1913–76) / Phantasy, for oboe and strings (1932) Jonathan Blumhofer
• Benjamin Britten / Phantasy Quartet, for oboe & string trio in F minor, Op. 2 AllMusic
• Benjamin Britten / "Phantasy Quartet", op. 2 kammermusikfuehrer.de
• Oboe Chamber Music britishmusiccollection.org.uk
• Listening to Britten – Phantasy Quartet, Op. 2 goodmorningbritten.wordpress.com

This page was last edited on 1 March 2024, at 12:15