Britten Complete String Quartets – Emperor Quartet

Boxed sets have a way of turning revelation into furniture. You get three discs, tidy in their sleeves, and the temptation is to file the thing away as a convenience rather than sit with what it actually tells you: that Britten’s entire creative life can be traced through an instrumental medium he supposedly left behind once the operas took hold. That is nonsense. He never left it behind. He just stopped telling us about it.

The Emperor Quartet plays the official catalog — Quartet No. 2 chief among the acknowledged works — with an eloquence that never curdles into polish for its own sake. That first movement, built from three ascending, kindred ideas that keep leaping up like a question asked with mounting insistence, unfolds here with unusual patience. Some ensembles rush the sonata argument to get to the meat of the scherzo. The Emperors don’t. They let Britten’s harmonic ambiguities sit exposed a beat longer than is comfortable, and the effect pays off.

The scherzo itself: eerie is the word everybody reaches for, and it’s not wrong, but Michael Kennedy’s word — panic-stricken — cuts closer to the bone, and closer to what the Emperors deliver. Britten wrote this quartet in 1945, in the weeks after he had gone with Yehudi Menuhin to play for survivors at Bergen-Belsen. You can hear that horror seep through the pizzicato and the sul ponticello scrabbling if you know to listen for it, and this rendition knows. There is a nervous, dry rasp to the upper strings that never tips into melodrama but never lets you relax either.

Then the Chacony — Britten’s own spelling, borrowed from Purcell, a composer he revered nearly as much as he resented being compared to — and here the group’s control of the long variation span, punctuated by those improvisatory solo cadenzas, is genuinely satisfying. It has weight without ponderousness. Not every quartet manages that. Some make the finale feel like homework assigned by history.

Where this set earns its keep is in the early stuff: pieces Britten wrote as a teenager and young man and then quietly buried, sometimes for decades, sometimes forever, until scholars and archivists went digging. The Three Divertimenti — March, Waltz, Burlesque — are lean, spiky, almost insolent in their brevity. I hear an echo of Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for String Quartet in their astringency, though I’d guess the resemblance is coincidental; Britten at that age was absorbing Frank Bridge and continental modernism in roughly equal doses, not yet fully digested, and these miniatures show the seams charmingly.

And then the real find: the Miniature Suite, receiving its first album here. Four short movements — “Novelette,” “Menuetto,” “Romanza,” “Gavotte” — and none of them lasts long enough to overstay any welcome. “Novelette” snaps to attention like a call to order. “Menuetto” is almost demure, oddly conservative for a composer already itching to break rules. “Romanza” is over almost before it begins — a wisp, gone — and “Gavotte” closes things with good humor, save for one clouded, sombre passage that Britten drops in and then abandons, as if he’d thought better of dwelling on it.

John Metcalfe’s viola in the Phantasy brings a burnished, dark-grained tone that suits the music’s autumnal turns. This is chamber music that keeps circling back on itself, elegiac even in its more animated stretches.

Sonically the Potton Hall recordings, made across several years between 2010 and 2014, are consistent: warm without blur, close without claustrophobia, the kind of engineering BIS has long specialized in. Compared with the Britten Quartet’s pioneering traversal for Collins Classics decades back, or the more recent Takács forays into the numbered quartets, the Emperors don’t reinvent anything. They simply play with intelligence, restraint, and, where the ghosts require it, real disquiet.

Worth having. Worth more than shelf space.