Richard Flury

The exploration of the music of the Swiss composer Richard Flury (1896–1967) on Toccata Classics now turns to his chamber output, with this first recording of his String Quartets Nos. 1 and 4. Flury was himself a gifted violinist, and these works – written for personal pleasure and for musician friends – were composed with an intimate familiarity with the medium. In the fourteen years between these two quartets, Flury’s musical language consolidated, from the early foray into mild modernism heard in No. 1 into the rich, late-Romantic aesthetic of No. 4.

This second volume of orchestral music by the Swiss composer Richard Flury (1896–1967) brings works from across his career. A suite drawn from an early Festspiel – a community pageant – opens with a march of Elgarian swagger and continues with a mix of charm and substance. Flury was a gifted violinist, and his Third Violin Concerto, written at the height of the Second World War, is virtuosic and lyrical in equal measure, its unashamed Romanticism perhaps an escape from troubled times. The four late Caprices for violin and orchestra form a concertante serenade in all but name; and one of his very last pieces was a dark and moving tribute to a musician friend, the slow movement of a suite he did not live to finish.