Sisters Laura, Eleanor and Amy Stanford established the Stanford Quartet at the Royal Academy of Music with cellist Jessica Cox.   In 1999 the Stanford Quartet was pleased to be awarded a scholarship to attend the Chillingirian String Quartet course at West Dean College and in 2000 won the John.B.McEwan Quartet Prize performing the Ravel string quartet.

      This concert includes two works written in 1908 by composers who had been master and pupil, Stanford and Vaughan Williams.   For most of our audience, this will be the first occasion that they will have had the opportunity to hear Stanford's String Quartet in B flat.   The third work in the concert, Walton's String Quartet in A minor was premiered in 1947.

      Ralph Vaughan Williams was a pupil of Charles Villiers Stanford at the Royal College of Music, but unlike Stanford he seemed determined to get away from the Austro-German musical tradition.   He wrote his first string quartet after taking some lessons with Ravel.   It is the influence of Ravel that we hear in Vaughan Williams' String Quartet in G minor, rather than the influence of Stanford.

      Joseph Joachim was a friend of the family and a mentor of Charles Villiers Stanford.   After studying music at Cambridge, Stanford furthered his studies of musical composition for two years in Leipzig.   Whenever he was in Berlin — and later whenever the Joachim Quartet visited London — Stanford would attend the Joachim Quartet's concerts.   He was present when the Joachim Quartet premiered Brahms' Quartet in B flat in 1876.
      It was not until he was approaching middle-age that Stanford wrote his first string quartet, and by then he had written many other chamber works.   However, even with his first string quartet, it is obvious that Stanford has complete mastery of this idiom.   The quartet in B flat was written in 1908   "In Memoriam Joseph Joachim" who had died the previous year.

      William Walton spent much of the Second World War writing patriotic film music.   When he turned to writing a string quartet in 1945, he initially found writing for just four string instruments very taxing. However, Walton finished it in time for its premiere in 1947 by the Blech Quartet.