Arthur Bliss belongs to the generation of English composers who came to maturity in the years between the two World Wars. Bliss wrote his String Quartet in A major in 1915, when serving in France during the Great War. Lady Elgar found it “full of eager life and exhilarating energy and hope”. The work later published as String Quartet No. 1 in B flat major, was written during his stay in America. It shows the composer’s command of the medium in idiomatic string-writing and is immediately attractive yet deeply felt. Conversations, written in Paris immediately after the war, is both a playful homage to the group of young French composers loosely banded together as Les Six, as well as contemporary reaction to the horrors of the preceding decade.