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  • The Music of Frank Bridge by Fabian Huss
  • Ben Earle
The Music of Frank Bridge. By Fabian Huss. pp. 259. (The Boydell Press, Woodbridge and Rochester, NY, 2015. £50. ISBN 978-1-78327-059-0.)

When does a composer cease to be ‘unfairly neglected’? Little of Frank Bridge’s music was played or studied in the three decades after his death in 1941, but the revival that got under way in the mid-1970s would seem now to have run its course. The previously unpublished scores of Bridge’s maturity have all been issued; pretty much his every note (including unpublished student efforts) has been recorded, some pieces several times over; and there have been a number of monographs, most notably Paul Hindmarsh’s Frank Bridge: A Thematic Catalogue, 1900–1941 (London, 1983) and Anthony Payne’s short study, Frank Bridge—Radical and Conservative (London, 1999, in its most recent manifestation). No performer today need be unaware of Bridge’s achievement, but the effect of all this recuperative and proselytizing activity on concert programming has perhaps not been all that great. The one major composition of Bridge’s that genuinely maintains a place in the international repertory, the Cello Sonata of 1915–17, was the one that was always played, even in the 1940s and 1950s. When it comes to the ‘Concerto elegiaco’, Oration for cello and orchestra (1930), the work generally regarded by Bridge aficionados as his greatest, the data available from the publisher (at www.fabermusic.com, accessed 24 March 2016) reveals a steady average of no more than about two performances a year since the 1980s. With one or two exceptions, the front rank of pianists do not play Bridge’s Sonata (1921–4), nor any of his many other shorter compositions for their instrument. Nor are Bridge’s four string quartets prominent in the repertory of the leading international ensembles (British music specialists such as the Maggini aside). If quartets have a work by Bridge in their repertory, it will be the Three Idylls (1906), a set of salon-friendly miniatures celebrated more, one suspects, for having provided Benjamin Britten with the starting point for his Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, Op. 10 (1937) than on their own merits. This may seem a disappointing situation. Of the quartets, in particular, the Second (1915) and Third (1925–7) must be among the very finest chamber music by a British composer, and surely worthy of greater exposure. But the fact that the Bridge revival has never quite taken fire should not really be so surprising. His is a refined and subtle idiom, that of a musician’s composer, one might say, whose work tends to turn inwards rather than invite applause. Bridge’s shift to a decidedly modernistic style in the post-First World War period, modelled after the later Debussy and Scriabin, would seem to have settled his music’s fate, or at least, that of the work produced in his full maturity. To this day it is the more stylistically conventional pieces completed before 1918 that are more frequently performed.

It is these same characteristics—refinement of craftsmanship and a tendency to modernism—that make Bridge’s music a gift to analysts, admirers of purely technical innovation that they tend to be. It is the analysability of Bridge to which Fabian Huss primarily responds in his new book. Analysis was already the focus of Payne’s study, as one might expect from the work of a critic who is also a distinguished composer. But with well over twice Payne’s space at his disposal, Huss is able to go into much greater detail. He does not always choose to do so. In the case of such music as the Suite for strings (1910), some of the most attractive of Bridge’s early maturity, Payne’s account (at pp. 29–33, consisting primarily of annotated music examples) remains [End Page 358] the more thorough. And this gives us the key to Huss’s approach. In a determinedly old-fashioned manner, he adopts a teleological perspective, in which the paradigm of Bridge’s achievement is taken to be the Third String Quartet, the work...

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