Saint-Saëns, a master of chamber music, considered York Bowen the finest English composer of his generation, yet for so long he was neglected and his prolific output wrongly regarded as an impediment to a proper appreciation of his art and craftsmanship. Today Bowen’s music is, not before time, enjoying a major revival and these recordings of his large-scale solo string works with piano can only help to reinforce our awareness of his consummate mastery of extended musical forms in the demanding idiom of absolute music. The two viola sonatas, written for Lionel Tertis, are indicative of Bowen’s powers as he was leaving the RAM in 1905: ambitious first movements (both in the region of 12 minutes), virtuoso finales, and song-like (often plangent) slow movements where Tertis’s tone was allowed to shine. James Boyd revels in the spacious writing for viola, especially in the later Phantasy, Op 54 (1918 – musically tauter than the sonatas) and Bengt Forsberg brings a sensitivity to the challenging piano parts (reflective of Bowen’s prodigious performing abilities).

The later chamber works reveal the vibrantly colourful spectrum of Bowen’s more advanced harmonic language, one that extends from progressions verging on the salon (albeit a suave, high-class one) to those of a complex polyphony common to Rachmaninov and, later, Medtner. Indeed, the Suite for violin, Op 28 (1909), dedicated to and first performed by Kreisler and immensely popular in its day, explores both these stylistic polarities (which are performed with conviction and panache by Krysia Osostowicz and Michael Dussek).

After the First World War, when Bowen’s saturatedly romantic idiom was eclipsed, the Cello Sonata (1921) exposed a more pensive, classical cohesion and a more serious demeanour, especially in the first and second movements. Jane Salmon brings out these facets in what are imposingly weighty essays, as does Osostowicz in the Violin Sonata, Op 112, written after the Second World War. To me at least, this is perhaps the most impressive of all the sonatas, especially the affecting slow movement, which seems to encapsulate Bowen’s entirely individual chemistry of debonair sophistication, lyricism and nostalgia. Also, the clear sound quality of both these CDs has a striking immediacy which only serves to enhance these fine performances. Perhaps in time Dutton might revive some of the wind sonatas?