Wit as well as social conscience

★★★★

A Belgian-Swiss quartet with a 50-50 gender split places “the promotion of music written by women composers” at the top of its mission statement. Resistant as I am to social agendas in music, the content of this album triumphs over its ideology.

Four women composers are represented. Germaine Tailleferre (1892-1983) was the only woman among Les Six acolytes of the iconoclast Erik Satie. Where the men went on to varying degrees of esteem, Tailleferre went to live with Maurice Ravel, married an American, divorced and repatriated, never settling into a career pattern. At the age of 84, she was teaching music in a Paris kindergarten.

Her second string quartet, dated 1926, owes its tonal colours to Ravel and the brevity of its movements to Satie. Tailleferre’s own voice is harder to identify. Some said she lacked confidence. Virginia Woolf cited her in an essay as a composer who was under-appreciated because of her sex. This music does not add to the argument, either way.

By contrast, Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979) has a voice that blazes through her 1926 Poem for string quartet. Just eight minutes long, it has the swing of London’s roaring twenties along with a fastidious detachment that is the composer’s stance. A virtuoso violist, Clarke played in the Queens Hall Orchestra, had a long affair with a married singer, shared a US prize with the eminent Ernst Bloch and settled in New York with one of the founders of the Juilliard School. You never have to make a case for Clarke. Her music is distinctive and individual.

Florence Price (1887-1953) has been promoted as a victim of female and ethnic discrimination. Her second string quartet, dated 1932, followed closely after her first symphony. The instrumental lines are expertly interwoven. The music overflows its four-square form. Three or four tunes are African-American but there are also nods to modernism and anticipations of minimalism. This is headstrong stuff.

The album closes with a Belgian contemporary Line Adam, whose two epigrams are titled “Amazon” and “plum jam”. There is wit to the Avril Quartet as well as social conscience. I look forward to hearing them live.