Available to download from Historic Recordings

As noted above, the Virtuoso String Quartet was formed by the Gramophone Company expressly for making records. They were the first to commit Cesar Franck’s String Quartet to disc, in a very late acoustic, made over the first few months of 1925. Their other acoustic recordings include Beethoven’s Quartet No.8; Frank Bridge’s Three Idylls; and Tchaikovsky’s 1st Quartet. They continued recording through to the early electrical period, recording more Beethoven quartets, and the Debussy quartet, as well as a number of shorter pieces.

This work divides opinions, as these two excerpts quoted in Cobbett’s Cyclopedic Guide to Chamber Music make clear:

“There is no reason why a string quartet should not, by means of double stops, produce a passage that effectively imitates an octet. But there is no excuse for making a string quartet play for pages together in such masses of double stops that there is no more evidence of four individual players than in a piano four-hand duet. It is no defence that such writing (as in Grieg’s G minor quartet) is ‘effective’; to prolong it is to do a ridiculously easy thing at the expense of all higher possibilities. César Franck’s string quartet is in this way a disappointment to every one who can appreciate the essential, if sometimes harmlessly orchestral, quintuplicity of his great piano quintet. The string quartet is full of excellent organ music, and it imitates the organ very skillfully. But, except for the scherzo, which is fully of anybody’s brilliance, there is strangely little evidence that it is a quartet at all.”

Donald F. Tovey

“If for nothing else, I should hold the gramophone justified by making us free of César Franck’s sonata and quartet and sublime quintet. He, perhaps, more than any other composer, requires the right mood for his music, and how seldom shall we find it in a concert hall! I do not care to hear that quartet in a crowd, but in my own room with my own books and pictures round me, I am beside him in his organ loft, and I have heard the ‘seraphim whose footfalls tinkled on the tufted floor.’ Surely, if ever the Holy Angels walked beside a human being, they walked beside César Franck up there in the organ loft of Ste. Clotilde. Like Blake, he never lost his childish vision; and of all sublunary delights I know of few that can compare with reading to oneself the Songs of Innocence late on a winter night, and then playing to oneself the quartet. That, indeed, is to hold eternity in an hour. I am not forgetting Palestrina when I lament that the age of faith never really expressed itself in music.”

Compton Mackenzie

Virtuoso String Quartet:
Marjorie Hayward, violin
Edwin Virgo, violin
Raymond Jeremy, viola
Cedric Sharpe, cello

Mediafire link for Debussy – String Quartet – Virtuoso Quartet

(This is a zip file – left click the link, download the file, then unzip when downloaded)

I. Maestoso – Allegro (2 sides)
II. Adagio ma non troppo – Andante con moto – Adagio molto espressivo  (3 sides)
III. Scherzando, vivace (2 sides)
IV. Finale (2 sides)

Dittersdorf – Minuet from Quartet in E flat major

Virtuoso String Quartet:
Marjorie Hayward, violin
Edwin Virgo, violin
Raymond Jeremy, viola
Cedric Sharpe, cello

Mediafire link for Beethoven – String Quartet Op.127 – Virtuoso Quartet

(This is a zip file – left click the link, download the file, then unzip when downloaded)

I. Allegro (2 sides)
II. Andante sostenuto e cantabile (1 side)
III. Allegro (Rondo) (1 side)

Marjorie Hayward, violin
Una Bourne, piano

Mediafire link for Mozart – Violin Sonata in B flat K378 – Hayward and Bourne

(This is a zip file – left click the link, download the file, then unzip when downloaded)