Robert Simpson - String Quartet No. 9 (Delmé Quartet)

Information

Composer: Robert Simpson

• String Quartet No. 9

Delmé Quartet

Galina Solodchin & Jeremy Williams, violins

John Underwood, viola

Stephen Orton, cello

Date: 1989

Label: Hyperion

https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dc.asp?dc=D_CDA66127

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Review

This single-movement work has the sub-title, ''Thirty-two variations and fugue on a theme of Haydn''. The theme is Haydn's palindromic Minuet, and Simpson's variations (all palindromic in turn) plunge at once into a characteristically personal world: what might have been a meditation on the geniality of the original becomes a tribute to its earthiness and poise, as well as its artifice. That other master of large-scale variation from, Beethoven, never wrote such palindromes, and in our time they are mre commonly associated with the serialism of Webern. But Simpson, recognizing that variations are more fundamentally about the balancing of contrasts than the elaboration of a unity, has achieved here a remarkably convincing overall form, as strong as it is flexible, as diverse as it is integrated. And the form is filled out with memorable material.

Simpson's invention at its finest transcends neo-Classical quirkiness as surely as it shuns post-Romantic self-indulgence. I would argue that he is at his best in slow, sustained music. The final stages of this work's fugue strive rather too obviously for resolution through various types of animated passage-work: but his slow writing has a visionary quality very rare in music at the moment and, for all its 'conservative' idiom, it is an idealistic, not an escapist vision.

Understandably, the Delme Quartet respond with tremendous dedication to a work written for their twentieth anniversary. The sound is possibly rather strident in the more turbulent variations, but the players rightly aim for the substance of the music, and not for mere beauty of texture. I cannot recommend this issue too highly.

-- Arnold Whittall, Gramophone

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Robert Simpson (2 March 1921 – 21 November 1997) was an English composer and long-serving BBC producer and broadcaster. He studied composition under Herbert Howells. Simpson is best known for his orchestral and chamber music, and for his writings on the music of Beethoven, Bruckner, Nielsen and Sibelius. He wrote 11 symphonies as well as concertos for violin, piano, flute and cello. His extensive output of chamber music comprised 15 string quartets, 2 string quintets, a clarinet quintet, piano trio, clarinet trio, horn trio and violin sonata. The Robert Simpson Society was formed in 1980.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Simpson_(composer)

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The Delmé Quartet was conceived in a taxi travelling over London Bridge in 1962 by Granville Delmé Jones and Jurgen Hess (violins), John Underwood (viola) and Joy Hall (cello). Galina Solodchin joined the quartet in the late 1960s after the death of Granville Jones. John Trusler and Jonathan Williams joined the quartet in the mid-’70s. John Underwood is therefore the sole remaining foundermember. Over the past four decades the Delmé has appeared at most major European festivals. The quartet’s collaboration with a number of notable composers is well known, particularly that with the late Robert Simpson.
http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/a.asp?a=A102

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