Piatti Quartet: Vaughan Williams, Moeran & Ireland

Description

Until recently, we were unaware of the rich output of the Irish composer Ina Boyle, who has never been entirely forgotten as she was the only female composer to be published in the Carnegie Collection of British Music with her atmospheric orchestral rhapsody The Magic Harp from 1919. Boyle spent her life living in the large family home of Bushey Park, near Enniskerry, County Wicklow, and she only left it for brief visits to London, including lessons with Vaughan Williams. At the end of World War I, she produced a brief choral elegy Soldiers at Peace which was widely sung at the time although rejected by the Carnegie Committee (revived in Hampstead in 2018). The Magic Harp dates from 1919 and a programmatic symphony, In the Wicklow Hills, from the mid-1920s. During the 1930s, she produced a remarkable violin concerto (in memory of her mother), a Second Symphony, an Overture for orchestra, and several stage works including the ballet Virgilian Suite, The Dance of Death (a masque for dancing after Holbein), and the mime drama The Vision of Er. A third symphony followed, featuring Edith Sitwell for contralto and orchestra.
In 1934, she completed her String Quartet in E minor. Boyle's Quartet is in three movements and has a slightly spartan distinctive character. This is the first worldwide commercial release of this work. EJ Moeran's E flat quartet was found in her papers after his premature death. The work was thought to be an early composition, but this is not confirmed by the music, and it is now believed that the second movement in cut time dates from the post-war 1940s as there is a distinct feeling of the folk songs he collected in County Kerry and published in 1948. A fascinating recital by the Piatti Quartet is complemented by Vaughan Williams' Welsh Hymn Tunes arrangements and John Ireland's The Holy Boy in his arrangement.