William Walton
String Quartets

Black Box - BBM1035

The Times
Another CD worth noting is the Emperor Quartet's superb rendering of Walton's two string quartets. Anyone with set thoughts about Walton the conservative must think again after hearing the Emperors' gusty performance of the boldly modernistic quartet of 1922. The better-known quartet written in 1947 equally leaps off the disc.

The Strad
'Undigested Schoenberg and Bartok' was Walton's characteristically cutting remark, made in later llife, on his own first effort at a string quartet, composed in 1922 when he was just 19. We can afford to be more generous in our reaction while appreciating the composer's honesty in disclosing the principal influences on this substantial three-movement work. The Emperor Quartet gives them full measure, seizing each line of the slow final fugue with a firm grip and relishing the grit in the harmony.
It makes me wonder how much more adventurous Walton's music might have been had he stuck to his Bartokian guns in later life. Instead, the Emperors make the expressive leap to match the more muted tones and compact dimensions of his quartet from 25 years later. Judging by the tight intonation and unerring unity of phrasing on display here, the quartet has gone from strength to strength since winning the Evian Competition eight years ago. All its members weave through Walton's undemonstrative counterpoint with mastery. But William Schofield's cello playing in the third-movement Lento reaches an even higher plane of lamenting intensity.
…in the meantime these fine performances, outstandingly well recorded, need no such dubious enticement.

The Guardian
The young members of the Emperor Quartet give brilliant, incisive performances of both of Walton's string quartets, not only the one in A minor from his high maturity in 1947, but also the very early work that, after a handful of performances in the early 1920s, he suppressed but did not destroy. For that 1922 quartet - which points forward to a very different atonal style from the one Walton in fact went on to adopt - the Emperor Quartet have had access to extra material involving editing and cuts, observing those that were plainly the composer's own. The Emperor Quartet's speed are consistently faster than those of the Gabrieli Quartet on the earlier Chandos version, notably in the fugl finale of the 1922 work.