Priaulx Rainier: Quartet for Strings (1939) (Signum Quartet)

Live from the Library of Congress series in Washington, D.C.

PRIAULX RAINIER: Quartet for Strings

1. Allegro molto serioso (0:00)
2. Vivace leggiero grazioso (5:50)
3. Andante tranquillo (8:42)
4. Presto spiritoso (13:18)
 
About the Composer
 
A native of South Africa, Priaulx Rainier studied at London’s Royal Academy of Music, where she later served as a member of the faculty. Like her close friend Michael Tippett, she was largely self-taught and found composing onerous, even after she had achieved considerable fame through her collaborations with such star performers as tenor Peter Pears, cellist Jacqueline du Pré, and violinist Yehudi Menuhin. After World War II, Rainier found a rustic studio in St. Ives, on the Cornish coast, and became an integral part of the avant-garde artists’ colony clustered around sculptor Barbara Hepworth and artist Ben Nicholson. In consequence, one critic observes, her “conception of composition became increasingly sculptural, architectural; she hewed music out of sound or welded together great blocks of material.”
 
About the Work
 
An exacting self-critic, Rainier published fewer than 30 works, ranging from Cycle for Declamation, a group of songs for solo tenor set to Donne’s poetry, to the violin concerto Due canti e finale and the orchestral suite Aequora lunae, a sonic depiction of what were then thought to be the “seas” of the moon. She was also something of a late bloomer: The Quartet for Strings of 1939 was only the second work she acknowledged. Belatedly premiered in 1944, it was subsequently recorded by the Amadeus Quartet—its only recording to date—and choreographed (in a piano transcription) by the American modern dance pioneer Doris Humphrey under the aptly descriptive title Night Spell.
 
A Closer Listen
 
Echoes of Bartók’s spectral “night music” resonate throughout Rainier’s four-movement Quartet. Like the Hungarian composer—whose sixth and last string quartet also dates from 1939—she tracked the restless, tormented spirit of what W. H. Auden famously dubbed “the Age of Anxiety.” The slithering melodic lines of the opening Allegro feel highly compressed, as if struggling to break free of their rhythmic straitjacket. The second movement is built on Bartókian repetitions of small rhythmic and harmonic cells, while the bracing kinetic energy of the finale evokes both Bartók’s “barbaric” style and the elemental savagery of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.
—Harry Haskell, from https://www.carnegiehall.org/Calendar...


While the Coolidge Auditorium was undergoing repairs, the Signum Quartet performed at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, just down the road from the Library.

For more information, visit https://www.loc.gov/item/webcast-11081