This Britten work traces its origins to a chamber-music competition

The Chicago Symphony Chamber Players, in a performance June 10 at Symphony Center, will perform Britten’s Phantasy for Oboe and String Trio in F Minor. The work weaves enchanting dialogues between the instruments, creating a captivating interplay of voices. This program note by Chris Darwin discusses the origins of the Phantasy form.

Around 1900, the composition of English chamber music was not flourishing; audiences subscribed to the Vaughan Williams “cigar theory” — that music was a luxury that, like cigars, should be imported. Walter Willson Cobbett, an amateur violinist and an influential patron of British chamber music, however, was determined to make it home-grown.

Among many other effective activities, he instituted a competition for new chamber music. The first competition in 1905 required a “Phantasy” String Quartet. A Phantasy was Cobbett’s reinvention of the Fancies and Fantasias of Purcell, Byrd and Gibbons. It was be short (under 12 minutes long), treating the instruments equally, played continuously and with contrasting sections. That, Cobbett thought, would appeal to the “untrained listener.”

Frank Bridge, who later taught the young Benjamin Britten, came in second to William Hurlstone in the 1905 competition, but won the 1907 competition for a Phantasy Piano Trio; in 1910, he was commissioned by Cobbett to write a Phantasy Piano Quartet. So Britten would have been familiar with the Phantasy from both Bridge and from his own admiration of Purcell.

In 1932, the year that he completed his Phantasy Oboe Quartet, Britten himself won the Cobbett Prize for his Phantasy in F Minor for string quintet. Though the oboe quartet is a mere Op. 2, it follows more than a hundred schoolboy compositions, some of which prompted Bridge to take on the 14-year-old Britten as a student. Bridge instilled into the young Britten a strict technical discipline, which brings a satisfying structure to the free form of the Phantasy.

In his Phantasy, Britten writes ingeniously for the strings in combination with the oboe. The piece starts with a barely perceptible solo cello gradually approaching, introducing a march somewhat reminiscent of Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale, which had its London premiere in 1927. The march turns into a lively Allegro giusto (strict) with contrasting episodes for solo strings and then an oboe cadenza before the march returns and the solo cello leads us away into the distance.