Arthur Bliss belongs to the generation of English composers who came to maturity in the years between the two World Wars. The composer himself described the powerful Second String Quartet, written in 1950, as ‘the most substantial chamber work that I had attempted’. The Clarinet Quintet is one of Bliss’s finest achievements and considered by many to be his masterpiece. The clarinet was the instrument of Bliss’s brother Kennard, who had been killed in the First World War. As the quintet was the next work to be composed after Morning Heroes, Bliss’s overtly public requiem for his beloved brother, it is possible to view it as a further expression of his loss. For sheer beauty the opening solo cantilena must rank among the most memorable in twentieth-century chamber music.