Bliss's two string quartets have been rarely performed in recent years and they have not been available on record since the 1950s, but in readings as assured and as eloquent as these they seem among his very best works; their long neglect is hard to understand. It is all the stranger if one recalls the relative familiarity achieved by his two earlier chamber pieces, the quintets for clarinet and for oboe, neither of which has the intensity or the fluent inventiveness of the best pages here. Both are serious and very 'composerly' scores, with evident pleasure taken in devising satisfyingly but not mechanically ingenious forms, in deploying close and convincing argument and in deriving variety of incident from shrewdly constructed, fruitful thematic material. And the discipline of quartet-writing has made all the more direct the moments of passionate expressiveness that are to be found in both works, especially the second. The arch-like shape of that quartet's slow movement builds impressively from a pensive opening, through a fraught allegro (in both of these passages all four instruments are muted) to an almost anguished outburst from the cello (now without mute) which is given retrospective as well as actual poignancy by the logic with which the music then moves through a more sober eloquence back to the bare, two-note motive from which the whole movement can now be seen to have grown. In quite another way, the Trio of the same quartet's Scherzo is all the more satisfying for its very brevity, by its arrival at just the moment when it is needed and by the way it is lyrically and most delicately transformed on its recurrence.
These are genuinely 'quartet' pleasures, and both works are true quartets: no wonder Bliss regarded the second of them as the best thing he had done. One does not need to dismiss everything else of his as inferior to it to understand the satisfaction he must have felt in so skilfully unifying technique and urgent expression. The performances, as I have suggested, have the fire of commitment and discovery, not the dogged worthiness of duty, and the recordings are eminently clean and natural. Even if you have in the past rated Bliss as a rather dry old stick (and I would not deny that he could be, once in a while), I do urge you to try these quartets. Behind his tweeds, his easy bonhomie and his military moustache were a deep and vulnerable sensitivity and a subtle musicianship, and they are clearly revealed here.'