Robert Saxton: Fantazia For String Quartet (Score)
Quoting Saxton: My Fantazia for String Quartet was complete in December 1993 in response to a commission from the London International String Quartet Competition for a test piece for the 1994 competition. Funds were provided by the John S Cohen Foundation.The title gives the clue to the nature of the music: the viol fantasia was the chosen form of composition for the greatest English composers of the mid-seventeenth century, Lawes, Jenkins, Ferrabosco in particular. They inherited the techniques of vocal polyphony from Byrd and Gibbons and forged a new, instrumental polyphonic style. The culmination of this genre was reached in the magnificent works of Henry Purcell around 1680, and it was Purcell who adopted the spelling ?Fantazia?.I have always loved this music, and when asked to write a short piece for strings, I decided to pay tribute to this under-rated tradition. Most fantazias consisted of short, joined sections, and I have expanded this to create and eight-minute piece in three larger sections, the essence being contrapuntal interplay and equality of part-writing. (Any idea of stylistic reference would be absurd ion the late twentieth century). The first section is a lyrical allegro moderato which leads into a sustained and intense slow movement; this, in turn, gives way to a final quick section of a dancing character, a feature frequently encountered in Purcell?s own consort pieces.
