This chapter examines Britten's relatively few mature works for conventional chamber ensemble-just three numbered string quartets – and four pieces written for the artistry of a single virtuoso instrumentalist: the Sonata in C, and the three solo Suites, all for the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. The small number of works under discussion need not imply a lack of sympathy for purely instrumental composition on the part of a composer whose career was dominated by opera. Britten's precocious boyhood compositions include numerous chamber works (in 1926–8, for example, he wrote four pieces under the title ‘String Quartet’), and this early involvement with chamber music – continued as a student at the Royal College, where Britten played piano trios regularly – was certainly reinforced by his contact with Frank Bridge. Much later in life, Britten wrote publicly of his debt to his teacher: ‘He taught me to think and feel through the instruments I was writing for: he was most naturally an instrumental composer, and as a superb viola player he thought instrumentally.’

The cello works for Rostropovich (and also the haunting Nocturnal for guitarist Julian Bream) are solitary, private statements, and they do not offer the chamber-musical interplay of voices within a group. In clarity of line and textural transparency, though, they encapsulate that aesthetic ideal of chamber music – in the composer's words, ‘a subtlety, an intimacy … usually lacking in grander forms’ – that informs all of Britten's work.