This exceptional second volume in the Maggini’s survey of the complete Britten music for string quartet spans the composer’s entire career, from the rarely heard chamber version of the delightful Simple Symphony (based on tunes written when the composer was nine years old), to Britten’s final completed work, the Third Quartet. This last item is a true masterpiece–as sad and poignant a farewell in its way as Mahler’s Ninth. The magnificent finale, a Recitative and Passacaglia composed as a tribute to the city of Venice, haunts the memory long after the last note has died away, and the Maggini Quartet finely balances the movement between the need to press forward and music’s elegiac reluctance to yield up its final goodbye. It may come as a surprise to some that Britten, the great composer of operas and choral works (such as the War Requiem), also is such a master of chamber music’s most daunting medium, but it really shouldn’t. He was a great composer, period.
