Three Idylls (1906)

As one of the most sophisticated British musicians of his generation, Frank Bridge would probably not be very happy to know that he is more likely to be remembered today as the teacher of Benjamin Britten than as a composer in his own hard-earned right. Certainly, the return to the repertoire of his late and interestingly progressive chamber works like the Piano Trio and the Third and Fourth String Quartets is long overdue. In the meantime the one Bridge score that is anything like regularly performed in string-quartet concerts is the Three Idylls – partly because of its own intrinsic qualities but also because, ironically again, it is the source of inspiration of Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge.

Written in the composer’s early maturity in 1906, the Three Idylls are not without the occasional echo from the Edwardian drawing room in their harmonies and figuration. On the other hand, they are most seductively scored – Bridge was himself an accomplished violist and a long-term member of the English String Quartet – and irresistibly appealing in their melodic material. The Adagio molto espressivo, its deeply elegiac minor-key outer sections effectively offset by a rather quicker but by no means dispassionate middle section in the relative major, is particularly inspired. The rather shorter Allegretto poco lento was a peculiar choice for Britten’s Variations in that it presents not so much a sharply defined theme as an exquisitely contrived memory of a slow waltz. The work emerges briefly from the half-light in the brighter middle section of the second movement and it remains in the sunshine through most of the rather more conventional but no less attractive Allegro con moto.