Title: String Quartet in A Minor
Description: The work assumes largely traditional forms, to the point that thereafter many of Walton's critics, impatient with the composer's accessibility, familiarity, and unassuming expressive nuance, began to complain that his music was unadventurous, that it broke no new ground, that it merely comprised "the mixture as before." True, the musical language employed by Walton in this work offers little by way of technical or conceptual innovation, and occasionally entire passages go by that could pass for the work of a late Beethovenian contemporary or a would-be Brahms. Still, for most audiences historiography holds only so much sway when it comes down to an actual encounter with the music in concert or on recording, and what Walton's quartet may lack in innovation or surprises it makes up for in skill of construction and sincerity of expression. The first of the quartet's four movements is cast in a fairly traditional sonata form, the thematic constituency of the exposition being first, a soft and lyrical line presented by the viola and adopted with subtle variations by the violins; and second, a jarring sforzando figure introduced by the first violin in terse staccato notes, which gradually cedes to an equally agitated passage set in quintuple meter. The expository material is reworked in the development section until finally settling into a lively fugato texture, followed by a transition into a condensed recapitulation. The second movement, marked Presto, takes on a scherzando character. Its form is an irregular combination of two closely related sections in a playful triple meter, the second section distinguished by its employment of a drone bass. The third movement, cast, like the first, in a sonata form, begins slow and stark, with an elegiac melody in the viola that wanders gracefully through various harmonic areas. As the viola moves into a new thematic area, the rest of the ensemble provides quaint pizzicato accompaniment. The development and recapitulation are less transparent than those of the first movement, as Walton takes greater liberties in revisiting and revising the initial material. The rondo finale adopts one of Walton's characteristically punchy rhythmic attitudes, the refrain material counterposed with various episodic figurations. - allmusic.com