Phantasy Quartet in F minor, for oboe and string trio, Op. 2

The piece plays in a single continuous span of about 12 minutes, so there is no pause to applaud until the very end. It opens almost inaudibly, with the strings tapping out a quiet march rhythm before the oboe enters high above them with a long, searching melody. That march never fully disappears; it returns underneath the music like a heartbeat, sometimes so soft you have to listen for it, sometimes pushed into the foreground. The middle of the piece is the most active stretch: the four instruments trade fast, restless figures, the oboe often leaping and darting while the strings answer with quicker, scurrying lines, building to the work's loudest and most urgent moment. After that peak, the energy drains away almost as gradually as it built. The march rhythm returns one last time, now fading rather than approaching, and the oboe's opening melody comes back transformed, quieter and more distant. The piece ends exactly as it began, with the strings marching off into silence, so that the whole work feels like something passing by and disappearing again rather than a piece with a clear beginning, middle and end.

Britten composed the Phantasy Quartet in 1932, while a nineteen-year-old student at the Royal College of Music in London. The single-movement "phantasy" form, moving continuously through contrasting sections rather than stopping between separate movements, had been encouraged in British chamber music by a competition established decades earlier by the patron Walter Willson Cobbett, and Britten's teacher Frank Bridge had written phantasies of his own. The quartet was written for the oboist Leon Goossens, and it received its first public performance in London in 1933, broadcast on the BBC. Its polish and assurance struck listeners as remarkable for a work by so young a composer, and it remains one of the earliest pieces of Britten's to have held a place in the repertoire, giving oboists a substantial concert piece outside the usual solo and orchestral literature.