Piano Quartet

Judith Weir - who studied composition privately with John Tavener, with Robin Holloway at Cambridge and with Gunther Schuller at Tanglewood - was known as a composer of rare skill and individuality even before the BBC commissioned A Night at the Chinese Opera for Kent Opera. But the first performance of that brilliantly witty work at the Cheltenham Festival in 1987 was so effective in accelerating her reputation that two major operatic commissions, for The Vanishing Bridegroom from Scottish Opera and Blond Eckbert from English National Opera, followed in its wake. She has always favoured dramatic or vocal music and even her purely orchestral or instrumental pieces, often equipped with intriguingly suggestive titles, tend to have some kind of poetic inspiration. Her Piano Quartet, which illustrates her rejection of avant-garde techniques in favour of an idiom derived from a variety of folk-song sources, is about as abstract as she gets. First performed by the Schubert Ensemble at the Cheltenham Festival three years ago, it lasts about 17 minutes and is in two movements.

“The first movement,” says Judith Weir, “is based around a duet melody first heard near the beginning, played by viola and cello. As the movement progresses, many different groupings of instruments are explored, playing together and against each other. On the whole, the piano plays at the extremes of its range, whereas the strings mostly play in their rich inner registers. The second movement is a variation set based on a folk tune. Quite a few of the chamber music movements I have written share this pattern; the possibilities of the form seem to me as inexhaustible as folk music itself. The folk tune here is ‘Blanche comme la neige’ a fragmentary French-language ballad (but heard in Louisiana, USA) about a girl who falls dead to the ground after the slightest threat to her honour and thereafter appears as a ghost. The story of the ballad influenced me to emphasize the delicate, plaintive and spectral atmosphere of the melody, which is heard at the beginning absolutely alone, very high on the violin. Thereafter, this tune (and the bass line I imagined for it) is heard in three other guises, ending in a very ornamented version for violin and viola.”