Few composers have been as thoroughly misplaced by history as Frank Bridge. He gets filed under “teacher of Britten” the way Salieri gets filed under “rival of Mozart” — a supporting role in someone else’s story, robbed of his own. The Piano Quintet in d minor puts that condescension in its place. This is a big, searching, emotionally committed work, and anyone who has spent serious time with it knows it belongs in the company of the Brahms and Fauré quintets, not in some footnote.
The history of the piece matters. What we hear on this disc — catalogued as H49a — is the 1912 revision of music Bridge originally wrote in 1904 and 1905, when he was in his mid-twenties and conducting his courtship of Ethel Sinclair from a considerable distance; she was in Australia, he was in London, and the ache of that separation permeates the slow music like fog coming off the Thames. The revision was not light editing. Bridge collapsed the original’s second and third movements into a single long central movement, and he threaded cyclic recollections of the opening movement’s material back through the concluding Allegro energico — a structural decision that gives the whole work a sense of emotional reckoning, as though the final pages are answering a question posed at the start.
Raphael Terroni and the Bingham String Quartet understand this architecture. They don’t rush toward the energico as if eager to be done; they let the middle movement breathe, and it is long, longer than you expect, full of those hovering chromatic harmonies that Bridge inherited from late Brahms and early Schoenberg and made entirely his own. The piano writing here is immense — not showy in a concerto sense, but dense, load-bearing, the kind of writing that separates pianists who merely play notes from those who hear through the texture.
Terroni hears through it.
The competition is not overwhelming. The Hyperion disc with the Nash Ensemble set a high standard — fresh, clean, beautifully recorded — and it remains the reference version for many listeners. This one is different in temperament: less polished at the surface, more willing to sit inside a difficult moment rather than project past it. Whether that represents a deeper truth or simply a less finished interpretation is the kind of question reasonable critics can disagree about. I find myself returning to this disc.
Then there is the Cyril Scott — a substantial piece, not an afterthought, running nearly forty minutes and generating its own complicated textual history. Scott (1879–1970, an almost unseemly span of years) was once taken seriously enough that Debussy praised him, and the nickname “the English Debussy” stuck to him even after it had ceased to illuminate anything. The First Piano Quintet dates from 1924, though the genesis appears to involve earlier material, possibly from a piano sextet or string sextet that got reworked — the liner notes apparently address the competing scholarly claims at some length, since Scott’s original biographer Eaglefield Hull, the musicologist Lewis Foreman, and the performer-scholar David Wordsworth have not reached consensus on the matter.
What the music sounds like, stripped of its historiographical headaches, is a kind of hothouse late-Romanticism that has absorbed Impressionism without being digested by it — the harmonies float but the structure underneath is sturdier than it first appears. Scott could be prolix. He could be self-indulgent in a way Bridge almost never was. But there are pages in this quintet that stop you, a melodic line that arrives from nowhere and sings with real intensity before dissolving back into the chromatic undergrowth.
The Bingham Quartet plays with consistent tonal refinement — viola and cello in particular blend in that slightly dark, woody way that makes chamber music sound like it’s happening in the same room as you, not in some acoustically ideal but humanly absent space. Brenda Stewart’s viola playing in the Bridge slow movement deserves specific mention: she carries a sustained line above a shimmering piano texture with the kind of quiet authority that takes years to find.
Is this the definitive account of either work? Probably not. But “definitive” is a lazy standard. These are two substantial, underserved pieces performed with evident conviction and real musical intelligence by a pianist and quartet who have thought hard about what they’re doing. That’s rarer than it should be. Put this disc next to the Nash Ensemble Hyperion and you’ll understand both recordings better for having the other.
