In 1905, the businessman and amateur musician Walter Cobbett sponsored a chamber music competition for young composers. The competition took place five times up to 1919; each time entrants were required to write for a different combination of instruments, though nearly always following the form of the single-movement Phantasie, which Cobbett had borrowed from the 17th-century fantasies for viols by composers such as Henry Purcell and Matthew Locke. Prizewinners in the competitions included Frank Bridge, John Ireland and Ralph Vaughan Williams, and even after the competitions had ended, the idea of composing single-movement Phantasies persisted in British music, so that Benjamin Britten called the work for oboe and strings that he composed as a student in 1932 a Phantasy Quartet.
Five years ago, the Berkeley Ensemble instituted a new Cobbett prize to honour and build on Walter’s legacy, and the three scores that reached the final of the first competition are recorded here. The winner, Samuel Lewis’s Sequenza, for string quartet and double bass, is an expert piece of string writing, though in many ways it’s a much less striking composition than either Laurence Osborn’s visceral exploration of string textures in Living Floors for cello and double bass, or Barnaby Martin’s haunting septet Lazarus, inspired by the New Testament story and full of arresting, keening sounds.
The ensemble also includes A Purcell Garland, deftly played arrangements of Purcell fantasies that Oliver Knussen, George Benjamin and Colin Matthews made for the 1995 Aldeburgh festival. But its disc begins with the work that was awarded the first Cobbett prize in 1905, the Phantasie for string quartet by William Hurlstone.
Hurlstone studied with Charles Villiers Stanford, who regarded him as the most talented of all his pupils – high praise when they also included Vaughan Williams, Holst and Bridge. The eight-minute Phantasie is beautifully crafted and elegantly shaped in what is essentially a post-Brahmsian idiom, yet Hurlstone never lived to fulfil his very obvious promise; he died from asthma a year after winning the competition.
This week’s other picks
British chamber music of a very different complexion comes with the fourth volume of Toccata Classics’ series devoted to the instrumental music and songs of Gerard Schurmann, now 95, who has lived in the US since 1981. Two tenor song cycles – settings of Chinese poetry and of William Blake, sung by Randall Bills – frame the disc, which also includes piano pieces and a flute sonatina. And for a very different side of Schurmann, there’s a new Chandos collection of suites from his film scores, mostly composed in the 1950s and 60s, with Rumon Gamba conducting the BBC Philharmonic.
