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| Frederick Delius |
In 2018 an unknown manuscript by the composer Frederick Delius came up for auction at Sotheby’s; it was bought by the Delius Trust who called in Professor Dan Grimley of the University of Oxford to authenticate and edit the newly discovered work. Grimley identified it as the two missing movements from Delius’s 1888 string quartet, previously understood to be lost. This early quartet had been rejected for performance by the Brodsky Quartet (whom Delius had heard playing a quartet by his friend Grieg); he laid the work aside and did not return to the string quartet form until 1916, when he reworked some material from the second movement into a new Scherzo. Grimley’s edition has restored the 1888 quartet in its original version, recreating the intentions of the young composer in a work whose ambition, freshness and vigour is a revelation. The 1888 quartet as originally written finally received its premiere from the Villiers Quartet in a performance recorded and streamed during the Covid restrictions of 2020, and is now at last being shared with live audiences.
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| Ailsa Dixon |
This was not the Villiers’ first musical rediscovery that year. In February 2020, weeks before the pandemic brought music-making to a halt, they gave the premiere with soprano Lucy Cox of Ailsa Dixon’s The Spirit of Love, a set of three songs with string quartet originally written in 1987-8. As the closing work in their recital, it left the British Music Society’s spellbound reviewer reflecting that ‘At the end of the concert there was a feeling that something special had just occurred’.
Greeted by another reviewer as ‘a stunning find’, The Spirit of Love was one of many unperformed works which surfaced in manuscript in the composer’s archive after she died in 2017, and set the Villiers Quartet on a path of discovery culminating in a recording of Dixon’s chamber music released last year on the Resonus Classics label. Among the most striking of these rediscovered works, and the last to surface in the attic of her former home, was a manuscript in faded blue ink of Dixon’s first known work for quartet, written in 1955 while she was a student at Durham University, where it won her the Kisch Prize. The ‘lost’ Scherzo is a lively, mercurial work whose changing time signatures play with the listener’s expectations in an engaging musical jeu d’esprit.
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| The Villiers Quartet |
Also on the Villiers’ programme is Dixon’s most ambitious work for quartet, Sohrab and Rustum, an atmospheric work inspired by Matthew Arnold’s narrative poem based on a Persian epic. It tells the story of the fatal encounter between an estranged father and son on opposite sides of a battle between the Tatar and Persian armies. Framing the human tragedy is the River Oxus, rising in the starlit mountains, tumbling down to the plain where the drama unfolds, and finally (as the armies light their evening fires) flowing into a calm sea. Before its rediscovery by the Villiers Quartet, the work had not been performed for 30 years.
Alongside these new revelations, the Villiers continue to champion lesser-known works by other English composers. William Alwyn is chiefly remembered for his film scores and orchestral works, and he disowned more than a dozen early works for string quartet when in 1953 he presented a new quartet as No.1. These early works were rarely heard before the Villiers Quartet’s groundbreaking recording in 2020. The recital will include his Quartet no.9 from 1928, an intimate, expressive tone poem inspired by Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Tickets are available via the church website.
