String Quartets
Strutt's String Quartet No. 1 has a long history. Originating in 1959 as a pre-student work, its two movements constituted the only remaining sections of a much longer piece of which the rest was destroyed. The two movements - "Lament", and "Scherzo" - were premiered at the Farnham Festival, Surrey, England on 12 May 1960 in St Andrew's Parish Church, Farnham, and were repeated on the next day at the Aldershot Festival, the performers being Jenifer Springate and Gillian Feltham (violins), Helen Johnstone (viola) and Dietrich Küchemann (cello). A minor revision of the score was carried out in 2003, followed four years later by a substantial revision which saw the composition expanded to four movements: I "Prologue" (being the original "Lament" of the 1960 version); II "Variations on J.S.Bach's Chorale Harmonisation of "Valet will ich dir geben" by Melchior Teschner (c. 1615); III "Scherzo and trio" (substantially as in the original version) and, IV "Epilogue" (a re-working of the material from the first movement).
The String Quartet No. 2 similarly has had a long history of revision. Originally composed in 1963 it was revised in 1991 for submission to the Third Concurso de Composición Musical ("Luis de Narváez"), in 1992 in Granada, Spain. The work is in four movements: Prologue; Scherzo; Adagio ; Finale.
The composition of String Quartet No.3 (from "The Frieze of Life" of Edvard Munch) was prompted by the Oslo Grieg Society's Fourth International Edvard Grieg Memorial Competition characterised as "The Music in Edvard Munch's Paintings". Its three movements are intended to portray musical interpretations of three of Munch's paintings: I "The Dance of Life"; II "Melancholy"; III "The Scream".
Read more about this topic: Clive Strutt
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