British Piano Quartets

During one of his recital tours to Edinburgh during the 1860s and 1870s, Anton Rubinstein bluntly told Alexander Mackenzie Sie haben keine Komponisten (You [Britain] have no composers). From his account in his engaging memoir A Musician's Narrative (1927), Mackenzie apparently let the comment pass unanswered. After all, the Russian virtuoso was simply voicing a view widely heard in continental Europe - and even in Britain as well. Many years later, as he surveyed a career that had spanned six decades, Mackenzie noted with "many gleams of satisfaction" the number of important musicians and composers of high merit who had come along. In company with his slightly younger contemporaries, Hubert Parry, Charles Villiers Stanford and Edward Elgar, Mackenzie was himself part of the generation of musicians born in the mid-19th century who first demonstrated that Britain did have composers - and fine ones. Their successors - among them Vaughan Williams, Frank Bridge, Herbert Howells and William Walton - completed the transformation of European opinion. Along with presenting a compilation of signal British contributions to the piano quartet repertoire, this set offers a sample of the music of some of the very composers who helped deliver British music from its lowly state as a source of jests to a place of international recognition and esteem.