The English Ensemble: Marjorie Hayward (violin); Rebecca Clarke (viola) ; May Mukle (violoncello) ; Kathleen Long (pianoforte)
All the members of the English Ensemble are Englishwomen, all are mostly English trained, and all are gifted.
Marjorie Hayward studied at the Royal Academy of Music for six years before she went on to Ševčík, the man of colossal reputation who trained Kubelik, Marie Hall, and dozens of other world-famous violinists. Miss Hayward excels in chamber music, of which she has had much experience, and she is also a soloist of distinction, as listeners have frequently had cause to acknowledge. Rebecca Clarke, the viola of the combination, is also a composer. Her compositions, mostly of chamber music, have had considerable success. A viola sonata, written in 1919, just failed to win the Coolidge Prize in America by a casting vote, and later she had the same experience with a trio. May Mukle, the violoncellist, is well known in England when she is not engaged in touring and giving recitals in all corners of the world.
These three have long been associated in chamber music, formerly with Myra Hess, and latterly with Kathleen Long, as pianist. Miss Long is a professor on the teaching staff of the Royal College of Music, where she was herself trained. At her recitals, many of which she has given abroad, she plays for preference modern French and English piano music, provided she can also include something by him whom she thinks the greatest of all composers—Mozart.
To speak of a work of a living composer as having been composed nearly sixty years ago, and as showing the then almost contemporary, and certainly prevailing, influences of Mendelssohn and Schumann, is to realize how near we still are to an era we are apt to refer to as not only past, but somewhat remote. Sir Alexander Mackenzie was twenty-seven when he wrote this, his first and only pianoforte quartet. It is true that both Mendelssohn and Schumann were dead, Mendelssohn in the year of Mackenzie's birth, and Schumann seven years later, but their influence, particularly Mendelssohn's, remained strong and almost unassailable for nearly half a century after their death, and it is only natural that a young man writing in the early seventies should have been unable quite to escape it. One happy circumstance arose out of writing this quartet. The famous conductor, Hans von Bülow, a great and powerfully influential man in his time, saw the proof sheets of Mackenzie's work at the publishers, greatly liked the look of it, asked where he could meet the composer, and took the trouble to seek him out.