The work is cast in four distinct movements, though as in Wood's violin concerto there is only one pause in the music, between the second and third; even here the break is minimised in effect by a resumption of motivic arguments. In terms both of harmonic structure and of expressive development, the four movements seem to have been conceived as a single, unified progression. While melodic and harmonic details are both derived from an intensive working of a handful of intervallic figures, in a way that owes much to his earlier serialism, Wood’s handling is here free enough to encompass a large-scale sense of tonal structure as well. Ths same tritone that inflicted so much of the melodic writing in Wood's 'cello concerto also affects the symphony. The music struggles to escape from an uncertain E/E flat area which dominates the first movement, towards an eventual unequivocal A

Price:£53.90
Product Code: CH60895

 

Quoting Wood: In my Second and Third Quartets I attempted sectional, agglutinative forms: in my Fourth I return to the conventional four movement form of my First Quartet of 1962. Both works build up (as in the 19th century symphony) to the Finale, thus making it the most substantial movement, which provides a climax to the work. The First Movement has, in both works, only the status of an Introduction.

But there the consciously willed resemblances end. This Introduction follows the Second Quartet to a certain extent, in that it provides a sort of ‘cauldron’, from which elements to be used later can all be plucked. Its opening will reappear at various points throughout the work, most completely at a climatic point of the Finale (bar 110). Subsequent material will be more fully worked out in the second movement, a large Scherzo. The Introduction concludes with an unusually placed violin cadenza (itself a rare

Price:£42.90
Product Code: CH60931