Phantasy, for oboe and string quartet

Suffolk-born composer Benjamin Britten produced an amazing amount of music as a youth, roughly 800 pieces prior to his published opus 1! Talent was clear from the beginning and brought him into contact with influential teachers and performers from a young age. He had already mastered the viola and begun writing numerous chamber works for all combinations of duo and trio textures. At 14 he was placed in the hands of Frank Bridge, a leading voice in the older generation of English composers; Britten also had interactions with John Ireland and Ralph Vaughan Williams during a less enjoyable stint at the Royal College of Music. The distant influence of Gustav Mahler was also keen and emerges in the heightened expressiveness of his youthful instrumental works.
The Phantasy for oboe and string trio is among Britten’s earliest published pieces, appearing as it did when he was barely 20 years old. It is a student work written in the fall of 1932 under the guidelines of a specific competition. The Cobbett Prize was a contest to write a multi-sectional single movement piece, lasting less than twelve minutes, and with a fairly balanced texture (i.e., not just a melody and accompaniment). It was offered by the noted arts patron Walter Cobbett, who believed that the 17th-century genre known as the Fancy played a critical role in the development of England‘s chamber music; Cobbett thus sought to encourage a new generation of fancy composition. Within a year of completion, the Phantasy was programmed at the prestigious International Society for Contemporary Music (April 1934), and the success of that performance launched Britten’s career in the larger musical world.
The Phantasy grows imperceptibly from the slightest idea: a simple rising-third interval in the cello. Next comes a repeated pitch motive for viola, playing pizzicato, and eventually a falling third interval in the violin. Britten’s measured unfolding of the thematic material functions like an incantation, while the minimum of pitch material draws all attention to the hypnotic rhythms. Onto this burgeoning world enters the wistful melody for oboe, whose very timbre and sustained notes mark it out for special significance. This haunting melody recurs toward the final section of the piece, but beforehand Britten builds to a furious climax on the energy of a new rhythmic idea developed in the Phantasy’s middle section. The whole work projects a cyclical design: beginning and ending with the simplest intervals and the soporific “tick-tock” rhythm.

(c) Jason Stell