Herbert Howells was a professor at the Royal College of Music for nearly 60 years. As a student I remember Sir David Willcocks championing his works such as Hymnus Paradisi. He would have been delighted that the RCM, through a research award, has supported our recording of quartets by Howells and Charles Wood, along with the Stanford Society, the Howells Trust, Howells Society and Vaughan Williams Foundation, enabling fine music thought lost, to be brought to the public for the first time.

This project can be traced back to 2009 when I was invited to perform in the St Petersburg Festival of British Music and took along Howells’s Three Pieces for Violin and Piano, Op 28, of 1917; the third one was particularly apt, entitled Luchinushka, A Lament on a Russian Folk Tune. I‘ve played these beautifully sensitive pieces many times since then in venues from California to Sri Lanka. Following an RPS award in 2022 to make a film of our introduced quartet concert during the V&A exhibition 'Fabergé: Romance to Revolution' I sought permission to arrange Luchinushka for string quartet as it mirrored Fabergé opening a shop in London and then being closed the year of the Revolution and it worked well. There’s some fascinating footage in the film with the RCM Chief Librarian, showing the original notebook where Howells jotted down Russian and Ukrainian folktunes to use, there being a certain Russophilia in England at the time.

I was then delighted to be approached by Jonathan Clinch of the Howells Society to see if our London Chamber Ensemble Quartet would like to play through the recently discovered early handwritten parts of Howells Quartet 'In Gloucestershire'. He’d composed this in 1916 but tragically left the manuscript on a train, never recovered. A couple of years later he recalled it and wrote it down in about 1920. Strangely this disappeared as well and a much later version, which has been recorded, is a very different work apart from the short second movement Scherzo. We thought this piece is really good and it was typeset and edited, with the help of our cellist Joseph Spooner. We gave a performance at Saint James Sussex Gardens, London W2, significant because it was yards from the home of Marion Scott where the first private performance was given in Westbourne Terrace. Siva Oke, Producer of SOMM recordings came to the concert and was keen for us to record it. The work is considered to be from Howells’s golden period of chamber music from 1915 to 1920.

I’ve also arranged Chosen Tune, the second of the Three Pieces for violin and piano which is like a hymn, dedicated to Howells’s wife Dorothy and played at their wedding. The title is taken from Chosen Hill near Gloucester where Howells used to love to walk and it afforded stunning views of the surrounding countryside which seems to be part of this music.

To partner these Howells works, we selected the latest quartet by Charles Wood (1866-1926) No 6 in D major from 1916. Wood taught Howells at the RCM and they later became friends. Known for his choral music, his instrumental music deserves to be heard. It’s interesting that Wood’s well crafted counterpoint, to be expected from this Cambridge Professor of Music, contains Irish reels and jigs, harking back to his Armagh roots. A bound edition published by OUP of his quartets (now out of print), was presented to the composer on his retirement by the Fellows of Gonville and Caius College. I borrowed this from the ever resourceful RCM Library to whom thanks are also due. I was thrilled to find the cover painting In Gloucestershire by Harold Gilman (1916) in Leeds Art Gallery.

The new album on SOMM Recordings with the London Chamber Ensemble and violinist and director Madeleine Mitchell is out on October 18: listn.fm/howellswoodquartets