Hough, Dutilleux & Ravel: String Quartets

If this premiere recording of Stephen Hough's String Quartet No 1 may be regarded as definitive-the work is dedicated to the Takács Quartet-those of the quartets by Ravel and Dutilleux are no less distinguished.

Dedicated 'à mon cher maître Gabriel Fauré', Maurice Ravel's only string quartet was started in 1902. On 30 April that year he had attended the first performance of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande and immediately afterwards set about preparing for the Prix de Rome-a prize he was fated never to win despite repeated attempts between 1900 and 1905. In the autumn he undertook a project for a fellow composer, Frederick Delius, who asked him to make a piano-vocal score of the opera Margot la Rouge. He then got to work on the String Quartet, and the first two movements were finished in December 1902, according to Ravel's note on the last page of the second movement in the autograph score. The next month, he submitted the first movement for a composition prize at the Paris Conservatoire, where he was still studying with Fauré. The jury was unimpressed and the music drew a typically acidic reaction from the Conservatoire's director Théodore Dubois, who proclaimed that it lacked simplicity. Even Ravel's teacher Fauré had initial doubts about the work, though his willingness to give it another chance was a gesture that greatly touched the young Ravel and probably led to the quartet being dedicated to him. The failure of the first movement to win a prize meant that his studies at the Conservatoire were over, and he didn't return there until several years later-as an examiner.