When Elizabeth Maconchy began her first string quartet in 1932, Vaughan Williams was in the ascendant, and Benjamin Britten had barely begun to make his mark. By the time she completed No 13, in 1984, British music was firmly in the era of Birtwistle and Maxwell Davies. Throughout this turbulent half-century, Maconchy remained alert to new developments, but her greatest strength was consistency, both in her faithfulness to the quartet genre, and in her unfailingly fresh, distinctive use of her personal store of materials and methods. There is not the faintest hint in this music of change for change’s sake.

There is certainly consistency in the prevailing economy of her formal designs. Compare the First Quartet (1932/3) with the Twelfth (1979) and you find similar four-movement schemes, none of the movements lasting much more than four minutes and most significantly shorter. Such economy leaves little room for relaxation, but even when fast movements begin with a rather dour intensity there is usually the contrast of more lyrical material whose warmth of expression hints at Maconchy’s Celtic (Irish) background. As her style evolved from something quite close to the ebullient early Britten into an idiom drawing on Bartók and Viennese expressionism, contrasts within and between movements or sections also intensify; the controlled but remarkably spontaneous lyrical flowerings in the Twelfth Quartet’s slow movement confirm her ability to sustain such procedures to powerful effect throughout her long career. Even the brief Thirteenth Quartet, written when she was in her late seventies, has absolutely nothing routine or etiolated about it.

Although the quartets might appear to divide into two distinct groups, with a 12-year gap (1955-67) between Nos 7 and 8, the essential qualities which Maconchy worked with are fully apparent as early as No 2 (1936), an extraordinarily accomplished and substantial effort in which European elements (Bartók, Berg, Janá?ek) have been integrated with those more fundamental British sources. Whether or not Maconchy actually knew much of that ‘continental’ music in 1936 seems irrelevant beside her obvious instinct for the spirit of the times; and although the earlier quartets can veer towards the over-emphatic and the effortful, they were laying appropriate foundations for the achievements to come.

The quartets from the 1960s and 1970s are more intensely dissonant, less traditionally thematic, than their predecessors, but they never lose contact with the ultimately romantic roots of Maconchy’s melodic and expressive style. Though always idiomatically conceived for the medium, these works are full of interpretative and technical challenges for the performers, and one could guess that, given a few more years and several more concert performances, the players on these discs might have provided even more accomplished readings, shorn of a tendency to the hard-driven that afflicts all three ensembles from time to time. These performances are tremendously engaging, nevertheless, the recordings natural, vivid and well-balanced. With excellent notes, this is a reissue to be welcomed unreservedly. If only some new record- ings of Maconchy’s music were to follow (her centenary beckons in 2007).