Vaughan Williams's chamber music has been generally neglected. The impression one has gathered from musicians is that it is respected rather than loved. Perhaps that attitude is changing, I hope so. Perspectives have altered in the last few years and many British works are being seen in a new light. These performances by the English String Quartet, with Norbert Blume as second viola in the exquisite Phantasy Quintet, are full of affection and are of admirably high and consistent technical quality. They are also clearly recorded. This is not one of those chamber music CDs where one imagines a microphone has been placed inside each instrument. The intimacy of chamber-music playing is captured, but there is a decent distance between performer and listener.
Nearly 35 years separate the string quartets. The first was completed in 1908 after VW's studies with Ravel, of which it shows some, and none but fruitful, traces. Yet it could be by no one else and it is amazing that a work so melodious and skilfully written, with its especially brilliant finale, has not entered quartets' repertoires alongside the Elgar. The A minor Quartet of 1942–4 is unusual in being designed with the viola as principal voice (it is dedicated to Jean Stewart, former violist with the Menges Quartet) and is more sombre and challenging than its predecessor. The slow movement, a strange mixture of archaism and the desolate mood of the Sixth Symphony, is one of VW's most impressive and intense wartime utterances. Its mood, and that of the whole work, is excellently conveyed by these performers.
The Phantasy Quintet, a Cobbett commission dating from 1912, is VW in his most rapt and meditative vein, and if you love the music that this vein produced, you will wonder why this short and beautiful work is not more frequently heard. Again, emphasis is on the dark romantic tone of the viola, and Luciano Iorio and Norbert Blume take full advantage of their prominence.'