It is just a year (October) since the Gabrieli Quartet performed for the first time in almost 70 years what had become a legendary work—the atonal string quartet which Walton wrote whilst an undergraduate at Oxford. Happily, the Gabrieli went on to record this large-scale three-movement piece (nearly 36 minutes), and it now makes a welcome appearance in the Chandos Walton series, ideally coupled with the A minor Quartet. It shows what an impact the young Walton had made on a select circle even by the age of 21, that the quartet was chosen as one of the three representative British works to be played at the very first ISCM Festival in Salzburg in August 1923. The performance was something of a fiasco— badly played at the end of a long programme, with the cellist getting her spike stuck in the catch for a trap-door, so that, to everyone's mirth, she started sinking below the stage.
Ernest Newman pronounced the piece ''horrible'', and the critic of The Times in a lordly way felt that the young man was unwise in ''forcing an immature work on the public notice''. Yet Alban Berg thought well enough of it at the Salzburg performance to take his young British colleague to see Schoenberg. Soon after that Walton withdrew the quartet, and though for a long time the score was thought to be lost; it in fact remained in the vaults of Oxford University Press. I learnt of its existence, when Walton once told me, at the time he was planning a Third Symphony for Andre Previn, that he had thought of orchestrating the central scherzo as part of a two-movement symphony. On that plan I assumed that, like a lot of Walton's sharp remarks, it was something to be taken with a pinch of salt.
That was the movement which Walton inserted between the original two outer ones. As first conceived in 1919 by the 17-year-old composer, the whole work consisted of a compact sonata-form Moderato and a massive fugue. When a performance was presented by the London Contemporary Music Centre in March 1921, a month before the composer's nineteenth birthday, the viola-player in the quartet, Bernard Shore, commented that he and his colleagues thought ''that it would sound better played backwards''. As well as adding the scherzo, Walton then revised those first two movements, before the ill-starred 1923 performances in Britain as well as Salzburg.
Yet what a remarkable piece now emerges, hardly recognisable as Walton at all, but full of fire and imagination. The composer himself later described this quartet as consisting of ''undigested Schoenberg and Bartok'', and it is less 'Waltonian' than the even earlier Piano Quartet, yet it is far more than just derivative. This was very much the period when in the first flush of his friendship with the Sitwells, he also wrote the first version of Facade, but unlike that glorious anthology of musical parody, this is the work of a would-be revolutionary. Not that the atonality is whole-hogging. One might describe the idiom of the first movement as 'pastoral-atonal', lyrical in its counterpoint with passages for solo instruments in turn punctuating the clean-cut structure. The scherzo, built on vigorously rhythmic motifs and jagged ostinatos, has much more of Bartok in it than Schoenberg—Walton had been studying the first two Bartok string quartets—while the fugue of the finale seeks to emulate Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, no less, in its complexity and massive scale, lasting almost 16 minutes. Nor is the Grosse Fuge the only late Beethoven model; in the slow opening section the young Walton equally reveals a debt to the slow fugue of the C sharp minor Quartet, Op. 131. As usual in the Chandos Walton series, Christopher Palmer provides an illuminating note. I understand he is not responsible for the fact that the disc and booklet incorrectly describe the quartet as being ''arranged'' by him, as opposed to being just edited by him.
The performance by the reconstituted Gabrieli Quartet (leader John Georgiadis) brings out all the latent power and lyrical warmth, often implying an underlying anger. It provides a fascinating contrast with the highly civilized A minor work of 25 years later, the piece with which Walton in 1946 broke his wartime fast from writing serious music. After his high voltage works of the 1920s and 1930s, it may point towards the greater restraint and poised craftsmanship of his later music, but few British quartets can match it in the sheer beauty of the first and third movements, and the point and finesse of all four.
The Gabrieli performance, recorded in 1986 when Kenneth Sillito was leader, available earlier in coupling with the Elgar Quartet, but the new coupling is even more apt. Both recordings were made in the warm, rich acoustic of The Maltings, Snape, with little discrepancy between them. Though in the A minor work the Gabrieli do not play the slow movement with quite such hushed mystery as the Endellion on the new Virgin Classics issue reviewed last month by AW, their romantic warmth goes with a more infectious sense of fun in the many scherzando episodes. It is perhaps ironic that the Virgin issue has for a coupling a work which relates remarkably closely to the early Walton quartet, Bridge's Third, completed a year or so later in 1925, with the mature composer similarly looking to Schoenberg and friends for inspiration. It is indeed that very work which provides the closest stylistic parallel that I can think of with the atonal Walton, though Bridge co-ordinated his central European influences much more consistently into a personal style, where rightly, as we know, young Walton quickly realized he had taken a wrong turning. But how illuminating it is to hear at last such a key work in Walton's development, which is powerful in its own right.'