Phantasy Piano Quartet in F sharp minor

A realist as a businessman - he made a fortune as founder and chairman of the Scandinavia Belting Company - Walter Wilson Cobbett was a fantasist as a patron. His mission to establish the “phantasy” as a modern equivalent to the Elizabethan instrumental “fancy “ was doomed to failure: composers’ enthusiasm for the form lasted no longer than the availability of Cobbett money to reward them for their efforts. Even so, a whole repertoire of “phantasy” pieces was created under his patronage and more than one generation of British musicians benefited from it, either as participants in Cobbett competitions or as recipients of Cobbett prizes at the RAM and RCM (including Frank Bridge’s pupil, Benjamin Britten, in 1932)

Bridge’s Phantasy Piano Quartet was commissioned by Cobbett in 1911, after the composer had established his credentials by winning second prize for a Phantasy String Quartet and first prize for a Phantasy Piano Trio in Cobbett competitions 1905 and 1907 respectively. Generally regarded as the best of Bridge’s pre-war chamber works, the Piano Quartet adheres to the Phantasy form by incorporating slow-movement and scherzo elements within an arch-shaped single-movement construction. In fact, it is particularly finely wrought example of its kind, beautifully scored for piano and strings and pleasingly symmetrical in shape. The thematic basis of the work, anticipated in a briefly dramatic opening gesture and definitively introduced by the strings, is a lovely lyrical melody in F sharp minor. That melody is featured again in the very centre of the work, in the trio section of a delightfully impish scherzo. It is also recalled as the main theme of the closing Andante con moto, where it is further developed, alongside overt allusions to a Viennese-style waltz tune only hinted at in the first Andante con moto, and where distant echoes of the scherzo are neatly assimilated towards the end.