What a lovely movement is the second one of Bridge's 1913 String Sextet! It demonstrates the vital importance of a rhythm in expressive music.

The renowned slow movement of Schubert's 1828 String Quintet uses very much the same principle to very much the same effect. But Bridge wisely put in a much faster middle section even; he knew that slow music however fine it is requires contrast. Shostakovich the Russian Communist composer had evidently not learned that lesson when he wrote his Eighth Symphony with that wearisome twenty-seven-minute adagio with which it commences!

No one is fooled by this photograph of Bridge.

It terminates mid-chest to avoid showing his poorly-pressed trousers and his sly boots.

How sad that an innovative and accomplished composer should be dragged into the Member's pettyfogging piffle about Shostakovich.

Actually we may have misled the Member by the way we put it. It is the second movement of what is as far as we know Bridge's only String Sextet. The announcer described it as dating from 1913, but both Grove and Oxford have it as "1906-12". We do not know whether that means that a first version was completed in 1906 and a revision in 1912, or that composition commenced in 1906 and was completed in 1912.

The movement conveys a most marvellous melancholy air of some intense sweetness' having been irretrievably lost. The harmony is complex but rational, very like that of that other sextet, Verklärte Nacht. We note the chromatically descending bass line - always the best route - and remember that Bach was we think the first to use one thus.

Well Schubert too puts on a spurt somewhere in the middle doesn't he - it might not be correct to describe that section as "much faster," but he had the right idea. Bridge's intention though was also to combine the two conventional middle movements which one might find in Mozart say, and of course he was far from the first to do or essay such a thing . . .

Mr. Sudden has said that S. in the Eighth Symphony also speeds up. We cannot say we noticed it - we just heard a lot of discordant noise at one or two points - but it will be one of the things to look out for in our second hearing coming up quite soon now.

Of course it depends over what total interval the descent is made,  but Purcell was rather fond of them as Ground Basses, both in his keyboard music, and also providing the substructure of the closing Lament in DIDO & AENEAS.  Cavalli was another fan of the chromatically descending bass-line,  and there are examples in EGISTO, and by coincidence, LA DIDONE also.

By coincidence I was spinning a compact disc of Young Frank's Lament for Strings only last evening. An attractive and moving piece, dating from 1915. I have a suspicion that it will not bear many repetitions, though, for reasons that have not yet been articulated clearly (despite many postings) in the What Makes a Good Piece of Music thread... ie the opening chords, striking and noteworthy on first appearance, become less so because they are not (or at least hardly - I haven't yet been able to procure even an unclean copy of the score) varied on subsequent repetitions, and, given that the piece is only just over 5 mins long, they thus give the impression of not being part of an organic whole but an idea that was, for FB, irreducible. More subjectively, there is something a little cloying about the effect of the whole piece. Maybe I should give it the recommended seven hearings though before committing myself any further.

[PS I like Bridge  ]

An alarming proposition even if we do say so ourselves.

And at breakfast time too!

 

Er, no, sorry, not in that. But perhaps in the Dixit dominus secondo a8 or the Laudate Dominum (primo) a5. Ah yes, that's it, the latter. Miseriacordia ejus is the text.