Charles Koechlin once claimed that “the viola would have to be invented for the Adagio from Fauré’s Second Piano Quartet if it did not already exist”. To an even greater extent its non-existence is inconceivable when you listen to Hyperion’s superb two-disc set of York Bowen’s complete works for viola and piano, including four first recordings. Inspired by the incomparable Lionel Tertis, his friend and colleague at the Royal Academy of Music, Bowen wrote music for that instrument of such richness and fantasy that its long neglect is one of music’s saddest mysteries. True, Bowen’s delight in resurrecting the glamour of the past and archaisms too long uncherished, sat uneasily with the engulfing modernism of his age. Bowen, like Medtner, had little wish to move with the times, and yet if his music is endearingly old-fashioned it is also full of surprises and of a harmonic language and idiom peculiarly his own. Only a puritan could fail to respond to Bowen’s warmth and exquisite craftsmanship in, for example the Fantasia, two Romances and the two Melodies where his sense of elegy takes on a double meaning: the aftermath of the war and the loss of what he saw as the departure of civilised creativity.

Both CDs are beautifully planned, opening with sizeable sonatas and continuing with shorter works before ending with more large-scale offerings, and the performances could hardly be more glowing. Bowen’s writing for both instruments is more than demanding yet nothing detracts from Lawrence Power’s and Simon Crawford-Phillips’s enviable fluency and achievement. Once again Hyperion has hit the jackpot in a much-needed revival and the sound and balance are exemplary. Bryce Morrison