The "Phantasy Quartet," Opus 2, is a chamber music piece by Benjamin Britten for oboe and string trio, composed in 1932. It was written during his studies at the Royal College of Music, following his Sinfonietta for chamber orchestra. The young composer dedicated this work to the oboist Léon Goossens, who gave the premiere performance in August 1933 as a BBC broadcast. The same musicians gave the piece its first concert performance in London in November of the same year. In April 1934, the quartet was performed in Florence for the International Society of Contemporary Music, bringing the composer his first international acclaim. The work's structure reveals a formal technique that Britten would employ repeatedly throughout his career—the "framing" of a composition. In this case, the piece begins and ends with a legato oboe melody over string accompaniment. Much like in Mozart's Oboe Quartet, the oboe dominates the ensemble as first among equals. The "Phantasy Quartet" was written for a competition for single-movement chamber music works established in 1905 by Walter Wilson Cobbett, a wealthy amateur musician and professional writer on chamber music. The term "phantasy" recalls the fantasias for viols that were a significant part of English music in the 17th century. The characteristic feature of the old fantasias, in Cobbett's view, was that they contained sections of different rhythms within a single, continuous movement. In July 1932, Britten won the Cobbett Prize for his Phantasy String Quintet of the previous year. That autumn, he composed the Phantasy Quartet for oboe and strings. Although it did not win another Cobbett Prize, it was performed in a BBC radio broadcast in August 1933 by Leon Goossens, the leading English oboist of the day. Britten noted in his diary: "Goossens plays his part superbly. The rest—although they are intelligent players—are not truly first-rate instrumentalists." Nevertheless, the broadcast and a concert performance by the same musicians in November did much to solidify Britten's reputation in Britain.
