The success of the Heath Quartet’s Gramophone Award-winning Tippett cycle spotlit the tip of the iceberg of a huge body of music that has slid out of view, including the three quartets of the once fashionable Peter Racine Fricker. His first two initially enjoyed top-flight advocacy from the Amadeus Quartet, no less, for whom the Second was written and premiered, and who recorded it on an Argo LP (12/63, coupled with Britten’s Second – my first introduction to Fricker’s music). Listening to these marvellously sympathetic, well-prepared performances from the Villiers Quartet (whose survey of Robert Still’s four quartets is also highly recommendable – Naxos, 1/15), one wonders why they are not better known.

The seven sections of the First Quartet (1948) skilfully fuse the quartet’s traditional structure into a single, bold span. The three-movement Second (1952 53) shows a marked increase in emotional intensity with no let-up in technical finesse. Astonishingly, the Third followed only 23 years later, its impetus being Elliot Carter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Third Quartet (1971), which had shown that the quartet medium was still viable. Fricker’s Third is a masterpiece of poise, balance and rediscovered expressive purpose. The five movements are in the leaner, partly serial manner of his later period and culminate in a virtuoso variation-finale.

This is the first recording of Nos 1 & 3 (and the 1943 Adagio and Scherzo), though there are YouTube postings of both – the Chilingirian’s performance of the Third was much praised by the composer. But these are outclassed by this new recording from the Villiers. Naxos’s sound, engineered by Michael Whight, is beautifully balanced and the best these works have enjoyed. Highly recommended.