Serenade for strings, Op.12

Although he was one of the most accomplished and most stylish of British composers of his day, Lennox Berkeley’s reputation has always been overshadowed in one way or another. For much of his lifetime he was outshone by his younger colleague Benjamin Britten; since his death his high-profile son Michael has become the composer primarily associated with the name of Berkeley. There is, however, room for both of them. The Serenade for strings is a valuable reminder of Lennox Berkeley’s gift for melody, his deftly handled rhythms, his textural skill, the clarity of his thought and - in spite of the inhibitions imposed by five years of study under Nadia Boulanger - the certainty of the personality beneath the modest surface.

Written in November 1939, the Serenade was first performed in the same concert as Britten’s Les Illuminations in London in 1940. If it still betrays the Stravinsky influence Britten had noted when he first got to know Berkeley in 1936, it also bears the stylistic marks of three years of personal friendship and even artistic collaboration between the two composers. Even so, the harmonic wit displayed in the opening Vivace is distinctively Berkeley’s own, while the rigorously economic and yet entertaining treatment of its playful little main (and only) theme is the kind of thing they both excelled in. The Andantino luxuriates in a kind of sensuality to be found nowhere in either Stravinsky or Britten: to a quiet pizzicato accompaniment on second violins and cellos and basses, violas sway gently in fourths and thirds while first violins introduce a seductive, chromatically inflected melody on the G-string. As that theme is developed, briefly giving way to a new idea on violas in the middle section, contrapuntal interest proliferates amid constantly varying combinations of instrumental colour.

In an average serenade the Allegro moderato, a rhythmically ingenious and resourcefully scored scherzo, would be followed by another, probably carefree quick movement. Reflecting the unhappy times in which it was written - Britten had already made his escape to North America - Berkeley’s Serenade ends with a second slow movement, a spontaneous extension of expressive melody ending with a nostalgic memory of the cheerful opening of the work.