alan little’s weblog

currently listening to …

7th April 2004 permanent link

… Frank Bridge’s third string quartet.

This isn’t exactly contemporary music, but it’s modern in the sense of modernist in style(*). Brief googling reveals that Bridge wrote it in 1926, and people seem to like comparing it to the better known works of Alban Berg (also that it’s missing from this otherwise useful Chronology of Major String Quartet Works. It sounds pretty major to me).

Anyway, I’m really enjoying it. It’s a tremendous piece of music, the performance by the Brindisi Quartet is excellent and the sound quality (on an mp3 downloaded from emusic), is perfectly acceptable.

Asking for modern music recommendations seems to have worked pretty well for me so far, so here goes again: I know nothing about any other music by Frank Bridge or any other recordings by the Brindisi Quartet. Recommendations welcome. (Perhaps the best thing to do would be to imply that I think all other works by Frank Bridge must be trivial crap because I haven’t heard of them. On recent experience, that ought to bring about a deluge of emails and weblog responses from enraged Frank Bridge fans.)

(*) *I* know what I meant by that. There’s an unfortunate disconnect in talking anything arts-related, between modern-with-a-small-m in its normal English language meaning of current, contemporary, up to date etc; and Modern[ism]-with-a-capital-M, a confusingly-named early to mid 20th century European artistic style. Modern[ism]-with-a-capital-M is now anything but modern-with-a-small-m.

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