Few British string quartets are as good as Frank Bridge's Third, and it has been unavailable on disc for far too long. The boldly articulated yet spontaneously expressive style of the Endellion Quartet suits this music to perfection, and Virgin Classics have provided an admirably open, natural recording.
This is a composition in which less accomplished players could easily lose the thread, or start to exaggerate this or that detail to compensate for their loss of perspective. The Endellion Quartet keep the blend of lyricism and turbulence that makes Bridge so very English and expressionist in excellent balance. They never linger unduly, nor do they underplay this music's complex emotional cross-currents. The whole composition is superbly imagined for the medium, and its moments of blazing power (the end of the first movement) and dark acceptance of inevitable melancholy (the coda to the finale) are realized with particular brilliance in this performance.
One can only regret that Virgin did not encourage the performers to follow the Allegri Quartet's deleted pioneering Argo LP (3/73) and couple Bridge's Third Quartet with his Fourth. Simply as music, the Walton is not in the same class, and these players are less at home with its winsome, yet heartfelt, musings than are the Gabrieli on Chandos.
The Endellion choose fairly broad tempos for the first and third movements, then attempt to animate the first movement's fugal development with rather heavy phrasing, although both their rivals are if anything too decorous in this distinctly academic episode. In the third movement the Endellion push on the poco piu mosso (5'03'') to an extent that sounds artificial beside their more restrained competitors. Even so, they bring an energy to the repetitive patterns of the scherzo and finale that creates a strongly positive impression, and the recorded sound is the best on offer.'