Four Quartets

Read by Fenella Fielding

2012

CD05SAVOY

CD

1 Burnt Norton
2 East Coker
3 The Dry Salvages
4 Little Gidding
(Eliot)

Total time: 59:06

Recorded at The Strongroom, London.

Engineering by Stephen Boyce-Buckley.

Production by David Britton & Michael Butterworth.

Design by John Coulthart.

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Savoy’s production of TS Eliot’s poetic masterwork follows an earlier recording of The Waste Land by singing legend PJ Proby. Where the former reading was mannered and deliberately eccentric, here Fenella Fielding employs an understated and sympathetic delivery, honed by numerous radio performances, to present one of the 20th century’s greatest works of literature.

The completion of Four Quartets in 1942 was the pinnacle of Eliot’s career as a poet, and the work which gained him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. Where The Waste Land had seen modern life in terms of a spiritual desert, Four Quartets provided a cycle of entwined meditations on the passage of time, the nature of existence and our shared condition of mortality which looked for the sacred in a world wracked by war. As an eloquent expression of Christian faith the poems of the Four Quartets manage to explore religious questions without resort to dogma or evangelism.