Henry Bishop's string quartet

[pcc]

It's been my customarily long time since I've been on here, but I was going through IMSLP to-day and someone has posted a score, parts, and _recording_ of Henry Bishop's String Quartet in c minor (1816) on that site.  The recording is quite good, if echo-ey, and the piece is a stunner; some critics have labelled it Mozartean, but it's much more Romantically styled and surprisingly committed.  In fact, it's the kind of piece that makes you say "HE wrote THAT??"  Terrifically intricate once it gets going, well structured, energetic, lots and lots of harmonic surprises.  Does anyone else know this? Have I missed this being discussed before? This really should be a standard repertory piece.

[matesic]

I suppose I'd better 'fess up - it was me, and I agree it's a very good piece. The "performance" is actually a multi-tracked fake, and at that time I hadn't quite figured out how to create a convincing acoustic. But I'm really glad you like it!

[pcc]

Great work on a great piece; heartiest congratulations.  I don't think I've ever been more surprised by a coupling of work and composer.  I've always liked Bishop in what I thought of as "his way", which outside of this is fairly light and restrained (and sometimes careless) but with solid melodic sense and a decent ability to orchestrate, but this quartet is something else again.

[matesic]

There's an excellent article by Nicholas Temperley in the New Grove, briefly mentioning the quartet ("vigorous and surprisingly inventive"). Temperley helped get me access to Macfarren's quartets in the Fitzwilliam Museum, but it was his U. of Illinois colleague Christina Bashford who suggested I look at Bishop's manuscript in the British Library. It appears to have been written after Bishop became musical director at Covent Garden, so definitely not a student exercise. And makes you wonder "what if.." he didn't decide to go after the popular opera market? What unsung gems do you suppose could turn up in Andrew Lloyd Webber's papers?!

[eschiss1]

I'm more interested in that incomplete piano sonata Sondheim was working on for his dissertation (and lots he's done afterwards), from what I've heard about it, myself, than in anything Andrew Lloyd Webber may ever have committed to paper (his father's another story), but happily and readily grant the general point.  On a slightly more general (or really the same) subject Ashbrook in "Donizetti and his Operas" has something to say, too, about how that composer borrowed (verbatim, I think he meant, as in arrangement/transcription of most of a movement or more, not just a melody or two) from one of his string quartets in the Sinfonia to one of his operas...