Bowen York: String Quartets Nos. 2 & 3

Described by Saint-Saëns as ‘the most remarkable of the young British composers’, York Bowen was widely known as a pianist and as a composer, his fame reaching its zenith in the years immediately preceding the First World War. The writer and composer Thomas Dunhill described Bowen’s chamber music as ‘an essentially healthy and breezy phase in modern art’. This description aptly applies to the Second Quartet, which won the 1922 Carnegie Trust Award, and while both quartets are based on clear-cut classical models, the Third Quartet is more elusive and intimate in feeling, revealing the composer’s rarely displayed private side. The atmospheric Phantasy-Quintet provides a rare opportunity to hear the beauty of the bass clarinet in a truly eloquent and expressive soloist capacity.