The sharp-eyed reader of Michael Kennedy’s standard work on the music of Vaughan Williams will remember that he composed three string quartets – but that only two were published in his lifetime and thus officially sanctioned. The select catalogue at the back of the book includes the Quartet in C minor, composed in 1898 and first performed at the Oxford and Cambridge Musical Club in London on June 30, 1904. It was later understood to be ‘unpublished and withdrawn’ until 2002, when it was among a handful of forgotten early works that Ursula Vaughan Williams allowed back to life, then published by Faber and recorded for Hyperion by the Nash Ensemble. This CPO disc, made in Cologne by the German-based Verdi Quartet in 2017 for WDR radio, is the first to present all three as a complete canon and is interesting for that reason alone; it also represents the last recording by this distinguished group, which disbanded in 2021 after a 36-year career.

Quartet No 1 was composed in 1908, immediately after VW’s return from Paris and his three months of study with Ravel, but Quartet No 2 wasn’t to follow until the dark wartime years of 1942 44, when it was a gift to viola player Jean Stewart and the Menges Quartet. Grouped together, the three quartets do share some fascinating characteristics of style and sonority, but more significant is the very individual sense of personality they display as single scores. These suave new performances are beautifully inflected and sensitively blended, if a trifle bland. Other versions get closer to the heart of the matter: the Nash unearth much more of VW’s emerging voice alongside other influences in the C minor; the Britten Quartet find the Wenlock Edge earthiness of the G minor to counterbalance its ‘having tea with Debussy’; and the Nash, again, penetrate the profound introspection and visionary depth of the A minor with moving intensity. If the notion of owning the full trilogy appeals, then these warmly recorded performances won’t disappoint, but they only tell part of the full story.