It is not before time that both these substantial Parry chamber works are at last available on CD. Missing among the manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, the String Quartet in G was finally ‘discovered’ among Finzi’s papers in 1992, yet it has taken almost 20 years for its first recording. Anyone hearing this work for the first time will realise just how ‘contemporary’ Parry’s organic thinking was in 1878 when the work was composed. (A useful comparison can be made with the Fantasia Sonata in B major for violin and piano which is still available on Hyperion’s Helios label.) This is challenging, intellectual music in which the young composer was mastering his instrumental art with the supportive eye of Edward Dannreuther, for whose semi-private chamber concerts at Orme Square it was written. Though a good deal of the compositional process owes something to the process of Brahms’s Op 51 quartets (of 1873), this work has an experimental abandon evident in the unconventional forms and individual lyricism which lend the work a different kind of syntax, energy and equilibrium. The daemonic Scherzo, compelling for its rhythmical drive and use of the viola’s lowest string, is especially attractive and was undoubtedly prophetic of the equivalent movement in the superb Piano Quartet of 1879.

The more mature String Quintet (another Orme Square work), where Parry’s voice is more clearly defined in the richer diatonicism, is a splendid and unjustly neglected work, with another fine, earnest Scherzo and a sonorous slow movement. The Bridge Quartet provide sympathetic interpretations of this unfamiliar repertoire which, like the chamber music of Stanford, deserves to be better known. Full marks to EM Records for making both these works available.