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The Spencer Dyke Quartet The Spencer Dyke Quartet was a string quartet musical ensemble active in England through the 1920s. It is best remembered now for a series of pioneering chamber music recordings made for the National Gramophonic Society. Origins Spencer Dyke was a Cornish violinist, having been born at St Austell on 22 July 1880. He won the Dove Scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music in London at the age of 17, and became a professor there in 1907. He was mainly concerned with chamber-music, and with teaching and editing. By 1924 he had written violin pieces and studies, had published editions of the classics and a book of Scales. In October 1923, Compton Mackenzie founded the National Gramophonic Society for the recording and publication by subscription of classical music, principally chamber music, which was of limited circulation. The Spencer Dyke Quartet was by then already well-known: Spencer Dyke joined the advisory board for the selection of material for the Society, together with Walter Willson Cobbett, and others. Cobbett had founded the Cobbett Competition in 1905 for a short form of String Quartet composition or 'Phantasy', and for other short chamber works. The Society was intended to develop the taste for modern chamber music. The Spencer Dyke Quartet, together with various other instrumentalists in ensemble, appeared on many of the recordings, and his position on the committee therefore probably signified the original intention of the founders to employ his musicians for the project. Notes from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencer_Dyke_Quartet
Beethoven - String Quartet No. 10 in E flat, Op. 74 Ludwig van Beethoven's String Quartet No. 10 in E-flat Major, nicknamed the "Harp", was published in 1809 as Opus 74. The nickname "Harp" refers to the characteristic pizzicato sections in the Allegro of the first movement, where two members of the quartet alternate notes in an arpeggio, reminiscent of the plucking of a harp. Like many nicknames for Beethoven's works, this is one the publisher came up with. Notes from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_Quartet_No._10_(Beethoven)
This Recording - Technical Assessment Original surface quality: Surprisingly clean, relatively low in noise and crackles, but with quite low recording levels making it difficult to separate music from background. Other notes: This first, acoustically-recorded release of the NGS is sonically a good deal better than many which followed it. There is a surprisingly wide frequency range to be exploited, with harmonics audible both below and above the accepted range for acoustic recordings. Overall I have managed to achieve a signal-to-noise ratio of a little over 42dB (around that of a basic non-Dolby cassette recorder!) and a frequency range which shows usable tones below 100Hz and up to around 4.5kHz (where one might normally expect ~250Hz to ~3.2kHz).
National Gramophonic Society recordings - a technical perspective
The vast majority of the original discs came from Gramophone magazine's own near-mint collection, carefully preserved in the EMI vaults at Hayes and largely unplayed for many decades. Where a choice of discs was present, naturally the very best sides were chosen for transfer, which took place at Pristine Audio over the spring, summer and autumn of 2006. Discs were carefully cleaned and a choice of custom-made stylii were available to achieve the optimum replay possible. Transfers were made at 24-bit resolution and then archived in 32-bit sound. Some initial restorations were carried out at the time of transfer, but all of the recordings presented here have been newly XR-remastered, starting in February 2008, directly from those high-quality transfers. Without the benefits of modern audio restoration technologies, it is safe to say that a good number of the Society's output would be beyond the listening tolerance of all but the most devoted and dedicated music-lover. Of the 165 numbered discs it is not until we reach discs 103-4 (the Malipiero String Quartet No. 2) that something truly remarkable happens sonically, a result of switching allegiances to the Columbia Record Company for recording and pressing duties. Prior to this the results are variable in the extreme - and the problems don't really stop after disc 104 either - we are still talking about the early days of electrical recording, and it seems clear from this history of the Society that money was tight. But for the 1920's listener, these matters would surely have been secondary to being able to hear any of these works at all, as the National Gramophonic Society's remit was to record music that had been ignored by the other record companies. The challenge for the 21st Century therefore is to render these recordings in such a way as to be faithful to the musicians as well as sparing the listener too much pain. I've tried to strike a careful balance between noise reduction and the dangers of over-processing and deadening the sound which, in some cases, may leave some of the blemishes more obvious than you might be used to hearing - if this is the case in any particular recording, I can only respond with "well you should have heard it before I started work on it!" There are many fine recording here, and I hope you will enjoy them as much as I have. Andrew Rose, March 2008
The National Gramophonic Society The National Gramophonic Society (NGS) was founded in 1923 by the novelist Compton Mackenzie to promote music which was ignored by major music companies. The Society was established for the recording and publication by subscription of classical music, principally chamber music, which was of limited circulation. Prominent on the committee for the selection of material was Walter Willson Cobbett, who was joined by Spencer Dyke (leader of a string quartet), W. R. Anderson, Alec Robinson, Peter Latham and Compton MacKenzie. Cobbett (b 1847), a chamber-music specialist, had founded the Cobbett Competition in 1905 for a short form of String Quartet composition or 'Phantasy', and for other short chamber works, prizes won variously by William Yeates Hurlestone (1876-1906, pianist) (1905), Frank Bridge (1908), John Ireland (1909), J. Cliffe Forrester (1916), H. Waldo Warner (viola of the London Quartet) (1916), York Bowen (1918) and Cecil Armstrong Gibbs (1919). In 1921 he was offering further awards to Royal Academy and Royal College of Music graduates, and commissioned many new chamber works from English composers. The National Gramophonic Society was therefore an expression of this impetus to the development of the taste for modern chamber music. The records, issued on 12-inch 78rpm (or in some cases 80rpm) discs with distinctive yellow labels, included the first-ever recordings of familiar works such as the C major quintet of Schubert and Brahms's clarinet quintet, along with pieces (then relatively little known) by Henry Purcell, Vivaldi and Mozart. The organization also helped several living composers such as Ralph Vaughan Williams, Arnold Bax, Peter Warlock (first recording of The Curlew), Eugene Goossens, Arnold Schönberg (original chamber version of Verklärte Nacht) and Sir Edward Elgar to gain greater recognition for their works. The repertoire consisted largely of chamber music, featuring the Spencer Dyke Quartet and the International String Quartet, but included some works for small orchestra and a few vocal items. Musicians who took part included John Barbirolli (as both cellist and conductor), the clarinettists Charles Draper and Frederick Thurston, the oboeist Leon Goossens, the violinist Adila Fachiri, and the pianists Donald Francis Tovey, Harold Craxton, Kathleen Long and Ethel Bartlett. The NGS ceased operations in 1931. Notes from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gramophonic_Society
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