Arthur Bliss (1891-1975)

String Quartet No. 1 in B flat major

Conversations for flute, oboe, violin, viola and cello

String Quartet in A major (c 1915)

Arthur Bliss belongs to the generation of English composers who came to maturity in the years between the two World Wars. It was once the accepted view that he had moved from the modernism of the 1920s into a more conventional Elgarian romanticism. It is only now, in a new century, that it is proving possible to see his work in a truer perspective.

The son of a New England businessman and his amateur pianist wife, Arthur Bliss was born in London in 1891. He and his brothers were brought up by their father, after the early death of their mother. Educated at Rugby and then at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he was a pupil of Charles Wood and came to know Edward Dent, he spent a year at the Royal College of Music, before joining the army, in which he served from 1914 until demobilisation in 191