Leon Boellmann is known chiefly as an organ composer, but he also wrote piano and orchestral works and contributed to the revival of French chamber music during the course of his short life: he was born in 1862 and died in 1897. These two pieces are quite original and well-crafted. The quartet opens over rather strange, murky textures with a striding piano theme which it develops effectively: as David Nelson writes in his insert-notes, the manner here suggests Franck. Almost as inevitably, it is the spirit of Saint-Saens that hovers, not to the music's disadvantage, over the scherzo. The Andante pours out a lyrical theme in which the manner does what it can to conceal a lack of real imaginative distinction: the weaknesses show at cadence points and elsewhere, though technical fluency sees Boellmann through here and especially in an ingeniously composed finale. The Trio is more advanced in every way, not least in the enterprising formal design as well as in the more advanced chromatic harmony. Boellmann was a fine musician, and this is not organists' music in any pejorative sense: rather, he used great mastery of the materials of music to explore a modest but distinctive lyrical manner.'