Both string quartets date from 1923, a period of great personal happiness for Boughton. Not only had he recently married for the third time, but his music drama, The Immortal Hour, had proved to be a huge hit on the London stage. The A major Quartet was written first, its manuscript dated June to July; the F major followed hard on its heels during August and September. Boughton organized a mini series of three concerts at London’s Aeolian Hall at which the quartets were first given. Hardly surprisingly, the accompanying publicity ruffled a few feathers among the critical establishment: “These Concerts are not for high-brows but for the general musical public who still believe in the common-chord and an occasional tune. No free tickets even for ‘the Profession’.” By all accounts, the performances were not especially convincing, the A major Quartet in particular receiving scant praise (though that didn’t deter Boughton from repeating it at the final concert). Moreover, as annotator Michael Hurd informs us: “Nor can the fact that he [Boughton] insisted the audience listen in a darkened auditorium, with the players behind a screen, have added to the success of the occasion.”
I’m with the critics on this one, I think. Even after repeated hearings, the A major Quartet, for all its fluency, fails to yield much in the way of genuinely memorable material. It bears the subtitle On Greek Folk Songs (though the composer doesn’t specify which) and would seem to have had its origins in some incidental music Boughton had composed for the 1922 Glastonbury Festival production of Sophocles’s The Trachiniae. Of its four movements, the third (“Threnody”) strikes me as the best, a deeply felt elegy in memory of Boughton’s close friend and administrator, Sheerman Hand.
At least the F major Quartet displays more in the way of melodic fecundity. Subtitled From the Welsh Hills, it enshrines memories of an idyllic holiday in Beddgelert, North Wales. Boughton denied any programmatic element in this appealing score, save “the emotional pleasure one has in natural beauty of a certain kind”. The writing is tuneful (try the finale’s secondary idea), often imaginative (breathe in the rarefied mountain air at the magical close of the second movement, “Landscape from the hilltops”) and, as the very opening paragraph reveals, at times cruelly demanding from a technical point of view. The brief third movement, “Satire (Conversation)”, mirrors Boughton’s disillusion at finding the summit of Snowdon to be a comparatively populous, ‘built-up’ area (a distressingly sobering sight, as any fell-walker who has ever picked his or her way over the perilous Grib-goch ridge will attest).
Hyperion also give us two offerings Boughton wrote for his talented oboist daughter, Joy (1913-63). The First Oboe Quartet (1932) is pure delight from start to finish (“small, sweet and Spring-like, with some of Spring’s sadness in it though”, to quote its creator), while each of the Three Songs without Words from 1937 (conceived for the same forces) is a reworking of an earlier Boughton song – the third (a languid, shadowy “Barcarolle”) is the best movement in what is perhaps a less-than-striking triptych.
Performances throughout are shapely and sensitive; the production is refined and balance truthful. Fans of this colourful figure should ignore my carping and acquire forthwith.'