Chamber Music II: String Quartets

Desmond Maley is the music librarian at the J.W. Tate Library,
Huntington College, Laurentian University.

The string quartet could well represent the supreme technical challenge
for the composer. There’s little room for flash or virtuosity in the
ordinary sense, yet the part-writing has to be of compelling interest,
exploring textures and registers in such a way that the listener’s
attention is sustained.

Applying this yardstick, the two outstanding works in this 13th volume
are Sir Ernest MacMillan’s String Quartet in C Minor and Two Sketches
for String Quartet Based on French-Canadian Airs. Finely crafted and
richly expressive, they were recorded on the Deutsche Grammophon label
by the Amadeus String Quartet in 1967.

The prominence of the MacMillan pieces (recordings of the works of
Canadian composers on foreign record labels are still rare) stands in
sharp contrast to the works by Couture, Kunits, Mathieu, and Smith that
comprise the rest of the volume. The Quartet-Fugue (circa 1875) by
Guillaume Couture, written while the composer was a student in Paris, is
the first surviving work in the quartet genre by a Canadian composer.
But it didn’t receive its Canadian premiere until 1929, and has since
been performed only occasionally.

The String Quartet (1891) by Luigi von Kunits premiered in Vienna when
the composer was a precocious 21. Kunits arrived in Toronto in 1912, and
the work was performed several times before his death in 1931. It then
disappeared from the repertoire until a 1975 revival performance by the
Orford String Quartet.

The String Quartet in One Movement (1920) by Rodolphe Mathieu could be
considered the first “modern” Canadian chamber work in terms of its
advanced harmonic language and distinctive form. It has received
occasional performances and was recorded in 1988 as part of the Mathieu
volume for Radio-Canada International’s Anthology of Canadian Music
series. Finally, the Two Sketches for String Quartet (1927) by Toronto
composer Leo Smith, although similar in style to MacMillan’s Sketches,
failed to receive performances.

Editor Robin Elliott, who has a doctorate in the history of the
Canadian string quartet, also contributes the lucid introduction,
critical notes, and bibliography. The layout of the parts that accompany
the full score of these six works is excellent for performance purposes.
This important publication deserves the attention of both scholars and
performers of Canadian music.