Colin Twigg Catherine Schofield Michael Schofield Lucy Wilding
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Bridge String Quartet in B flat & Free Spirits: Delius, Grieg & Grainger Bridge: String Quartets Nos 1 & 4 |
Gramophone October 2007
Andrew Achenbach
Naxos continues to champion Alwyn and now turns its attention to the chamber and vocal music. The ravishing Three Winter Poems for String Quartet date from early in 1948.
Performances throughout reflect great credit on all concerned in their scrupulous preparation and unquenchable conviction.
The Sunday Observer 1 July 2007
Anthony Holden
Financial Times July 2007
Andrew Clark
Of the rest, the best is to be found in the atmospheric Three Winter Poems for String Quartet.
The Times 29 June 2007 
BBC Music Magazine, July 1998
Ian Lace
This new CD follows the Bridge Quartet's acclaimed recording of Frank Bridge's Second and Third Quartets.
The Bridge Quartet traces the often delicate, filigree, intertwining figures with sensitivity and aplomb - [they are] totally dedicated to this music, interpret with impressive insight and conviction.
You can find d etails of the CD and how to order a copy here.
Penguin CD Guide, 2001
The two quartets are superbly played by this eponymous group, who are right inside the music and present it with an almost improvisational spontaneity. The recording is first class, with fine body to the sound as well as a convincing interplay of detail.
You can find d etails of the CD and how to order a copy here.
International Record Review, June 2001
Robert Matthew-Walker
[The Bridge Quartet] give here arguably the finest account of Grieg's G minor Quartet since the 1937 Budapest version, and certainly the most idiomatic of all modern recordings. This is noble playing, admirably recorded.
The Strad, May 2001
Julian Haycock
[This] is music that above all needs to be 'sung', to be exulted in - and this is where the Bridge Quartet really comes into its own. The group affectionately cocoons this music, enabling its lyrical impulse to emerge with as about as much warmth as it can take.
No less enchanting are the final two movements ... of an earlier quartet, discovered in the British Library by the Bridge Quartet's violist Michael Schofield.
If I have dwelled on the Bridge Quartet's outstanding Delius performances, this is not to imply that its playing in the Grieg is anything less than highly distinguished, even in the face of celebrated performances by the Budapest and Oslo quartets. Velvety sonics and excellent booklet notes round off an outstanding release.
You can find d etails of the CD and how to order a copy here.
The Classical Source, Richard Whitehouse
Having, naturally enough, put Frank Bridge at the centre of its repertoire over a 14-year career, it made sense for the Bridge Quartet to include a work by the composer for this return to the Wigmore Hall. A rediscovery too, as Bridge’s ‘String Quintett’ (note the deliberately archaic spelling) seems not to have been revived since its premiere at the Royal College of Music on 4th December 1901!
As effectively a graduation exercise, one can understand why the 22-year-old composer chose not to press its claims the more so given the stream of chamber works that Bridge composed over the next decade. That said, the Quintet impresses both through its technical finish and in the formal ingenuity worked into an outwardly conventional four-movement structure; in which respect, the descending unison phrase which opens the work and returns throughout as a ‘motto’ theme can be said to foreshadow the ‘phantasie’-form of many of Bridge’s subsequent works.
There are some striking incidental touches: the eloquent transition to the reprise in the opening Allegro; the rapt mood sustained at the close of the Andante; the already characteristic grotesquerie in the Presto’s trio section; and the succinct tying up of thematic loose ends in the finale’s affirmative coda.
The quintet was given a confident and well-prepared performance by the Bridge Quartet and Ivo-Jan van der Werff, his second viola part melding into the texture in a way akin to the late chamber music of Dvorak in whose ‘American’ String Quintet (not to be confused with the famous ‘American’ String Quartet!) Bridge had himself taken second viola early in 1901 rather than the densely contrapuntal manner more usual with Brahms.
One hopes that both it and the even earlier B flat Quartet will feature on a follow-up disc to the Bridge’s often excellent cycle of Bridge’s numbered quartets.
The gallic element evident in Bridge’s music from the outset has often been remarked upon and, even though the quintet pre-dates Ravel’s quartet by almost two years, the pairing worked well here.
Moreover, the performance, though not without its interpretative rough edges, was an impressive one unusually strong and decisive in the first movement, and with an almost angular gait in the famous Scherzo. Marginally too restive in mood, the slow movement brought excellent ensemble playing, with the vigorous finale seeming less of an ‘added on’ formal solution than is often the case.
In the context of his chamber output as a whole, Brahms’s quartets rarely receive a positive press. Less motivically obsessive than its C minor companion, while more coherent overall than its B flat successor, the A minor conceals a Schubertian pathos beneath its technical finish, with the relation in performance between them determining the effectiveness of the interpretation. The Bridge Quartet found an attractive wistfulness in the opening two movements, such that Schubert’s own A minor quartet was never far away, and if the ‘quasi menuetto’ third movement lacked a degree of subtlety in the unfolding of its harmonic rhythm, the stamping rhythmic drive of the finale was tellingly sustained.
A performance, then, which brought out the humanity in Brahms’s music, and how apposite that the finale of Haydn’s ‘Bird’ quartet (Op.33/3) should follow as an encore rounding off an excellent evening’s music-making.
Evening Standard, Monday 22 December 2003
Barry Millington
For too long remembered by many as the teacher of Benjamin Britten, Frank Bridge has, of late, been gaining increasing recognition as a major composer in his own right. More and more of his pieces are finding their way onto the concert platform and onto disc, and the String Quintet in E minor is the latest to be resurrected.
This early work of Bridge’s,written in 1901, while he was still a student at the Royal College of Music, may not have the searching profundity of his later music composed after the traumas of the First World War, but it does have a stylistic command and originality of conception that mark out this budding composer as exceptional.
Not by accident, the name of the ensemble playing the Quintet on Saturday night was the Bridge String Quartet (joined by violist Ivo-Jan ban der Werff), who have championed the music of Bridge and other British composers for some 14 years.
Since the Bridge Quintet recalls Faure or Ravel as much as the Brahms/Stanford school to which the young composer was exposed at college, it was a happy idea to include the Ravel quartet (which Bridge was soon to play as violist with the English String Quartet). The ensemble was impressively integrated here, violist Michael Schofield interweaving mettlesome short-note figuration over cellist Lucy Wilding’s firm foundation, with Mitchell and Catherine Schofield projecting strongly form the top.
The somewhat inhibited emotional expression of Brahms’s String Quartet in A minor, Op51 No2, is difficult to bring off, but these players had its measure,striking the vein of troubled lyricism that runs through this intimate and brooding work.
Sunday Telegraph, April 1999
Michael Kennedy
It is an impressive work [Bridge Quartet No.3] ... one respects and admires it, but does one love it? I can tell you that the superb Bridge quartet played it as if they do, just as they played Delius.
Musical Opinion, Summer 1997
One thing became clear during the course of the evening of 7th April, in the Purcell Room, and that is that the Bridge Quartet have a wonderful sense of musical expression, which is entirely at one with each other ... Bridge's Fourth Quartet was both vital and vivacious ... The players' awareness of and empathy with each other was apparent in the way motifs were passed effortlessly between them.
Bridge's First String Quartet was for me the focal point of the evening. The players were relaxed and yet one felt the electric pulse of the music pervading the hall.
The world of string quartets is a competitive one, with many fine ensembles in this country, but the Bridge are in the major league on the evidence of this mid-morning event.
The opening of one of the best-loved and most expansive of the Schubert quartets, that in D minor - Death and the Maiden - bore the listeners, a practically full house, away in its intensity.
The variations of the slow movement were full of life and imagination, the second with pizzicato cello having the melody, as particularly effective.
After an ever-so-stately Scherzo, taut rhythms took the finale forward in strength and subtleties while taking advantage of the Schubertian twists, and remaining totally balanced and integrated.
The Strad, November 1995
A crowd impressively large for a midweek event amassed for the Bridge Quartet's concert (5 June) and were rewarded with a dynamic performance. One particularly striking feature was a finely crafted balance of the ensemble.
The Bridge Quartet played with precision and great expressive flair.
Musical Opinion, 1994
The Bridge Quartet's superbly characterful account of Nielsen's Third Quartet, developmental and complex, was a breath of fresh air. Beethoven's Quartet Op. 127 was projected with compelling drama, especially the clearly underlined development of the first movement and the delicate imitations of the second.