Beauty Veil'd

Berkeley Ensemble unveils the first recording of Dorothy Howell's 'Lost' String Quartet in an album which also features world premiere recordings of rare works by Howell and her contemporaries.

In August the Berkeley Ensemble will release the first-ever recording of Dorothy Howell's long-lost String Quartet in D minor, a remarkable rediscovery brought back to life through the meticulous work of the ensemble's own viola player, Dan Shilladay.

Howell's single-movement quartet is a striking addition to the British chamber music repertoire. Performed probably just once in 1933 before being lost twice and nearly destroyed, its reconstruction from rough pencil sketches offers a vivid glimpse into the creative world of a composer once cheered by the popular press and championed by Proms conductor Henry Wood, but now largely forgotten.

The quartet forms the centrepiece of an ambitious new album that also features four other premiere recordings of works by Howell and her circle. John Blackwood McEwen, her composition teacher at the Royal Academy of Music, is represented by his Nugae, Seven Bagatelles for string quartet. These intimate, folk-tinged and beautifully crafted character pieces provide a perfect foil to Tobias Matthay's Piano Quartet in One Movement, an ardent and virtuosic early work by Howell's piano teacher and one-time friend of McEwen.

Howell and her near-contemporary Marie Dare probably never met, yet their lives followed a similar path from early acclaim as composer-performers to later obscurity. Dare's darkly lyrical Phantasy Quintet, scored for string quintet with two cellos, echoes the same sumptuous late-Romantic language that condemned both composers to obscurity as modernism swept Europe in the wake of two World Wars. Howell's own Adagio and Caprice for violin and piano completes the album. Written in 1955, its quiet and dignified air of melancholy never found fame in a musical world that had moved abruptly on.

In today's more eclectic musical landscape, perhaps it's time we listened again; to lose Howell's quartet a third time, along with the rest of her music, would be unfortunate indeed.

Composer: Dorothy Howell, Tobias Matthay, John Blackwood McEwen, Marie Dare

Number of Discs: 1

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