This ‘most intimate of mediums’ was how William Alwyn described the string quartet and it was an idiom he constantly revisited, from his days as a student at the Royal Academy of Music until 1984, the year before his death. The Seven Irish Tunes, all taken from the Petrie Collection edited by Stanford, date from 1923 when the composer was 18. Cloaked in a language of late Romanticism, these delightful miniatures reflect the fashion for folk-song arrangement so prevalent in the early 1920s.

Alwyn began to write quartets in 1920 and by 1936 had composed 13 works. Many of them reflect a need to experiment with form and language in a cerebral medium that largely demanded intellectual application. The Quartet No 6 in E minor (1927), dedicated to his teacher, John Blackwood McEwen (another prolific author of the string quartet), was completed not long after Alwyn became a professor of composition at the RAM. The first and second movements are tinged melodically and harmonically with that affecting, introspective melancholy of Frank Bridge’s chamber music before the First World War. A short, bucolic Scherzo then provides a transition to an inventive theme, five variations and an effervescent coda-finale. Dating from 1929, the Quartet No 7 in A has more of an astringent neoclassical edge in its Hindemith-inspired harmony and counterpoint and its four thematically linked movements. Again, there is much of formal interest here, especially the somewhat austere passacaglia second movement and the fugal third movement, marked ‘Rondo’, but the work as a whole is end-weighted in the much more substantial ‘Retrospect’ (almost as long as the previous three movements), a deeply reflective slow movement which barely rises above the dynamic of pp.

Both the String Quartets Nos 8 and 9 were completed in 1931. No 8 in D minor is unusual for its seven movements, the first six of which are short and explore a central thematic idea established in the first movement. In what is essentially a set of variations, the quartet culminates in the longer seventh movement, a more dramatic finale which concludes in D major.

Based on lines from Romeo’s Death Scene in Act 5 scene 3 of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the more challenging Quartet No 9 is a concentrated, one-movement form suggestive of a programmatic symphonic poem. An emotional, passionate essay, its opening slow contemplation gives way to more turbulent, agitated outbursts before the work ends in a serene C major. Both quartets are worthy of more detailed study.

These are thoughtful, sympathetic interpretations by the Villiers Quartet of a repertoire by Alwyn which has been rarely if at all explored since the works were first written, and provide a rich insight into the changing nature of the composer’s style between 1927 and 1931, when his musical language was engaging with a wide range of different vocabularies and rhetorical ideas – ones, incidentally, he was to use with much fertility in his later film scores in the 1940s and ’50s.