Library of Congress World War II Companion.

If this premiere recording of Stephen Hough’s String Quartet No 1 may be regarded as definitive—the work is dedicated to the Takács Quartet—those of the quartets by Ravel and Dutilleux are no less distinguished.Dedicated ‘à mon cher maître Gabriel Fauré’, Maurice Ravel’s only string quartet was started in 1902. On 30 April that year he had attended the first performance of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande and immediately afterwards set about preparing for the Prix de Rome—a prize he was fated never to win despite repeated attempts between 1900 and 1905. In the autumn he undertook a project for a fellow composer, Frederick Delius, who asked him to make a piano–vocal score of the opera Margot la Rouge. He then got to work on the String Quartet, and the first two movements were finished in December 1902, according to Ravel’s note on the last page of the second movement in the autograph score.