Although Sir Arnold Bax is now more widely known for his orchestral music, there is a large corpus of chamber music including three String Quartets. Bax wrote his first mature quartet in 1918, though it is a serene work with few overt influences of the trouble times in which it was written. With its gorgeously memorable ‘Irish’ tune in the last movement, the quartet was probably the best-known British chamber work between the wars, twice recorded on 78s but subsequently largely forgotten. With its richly textured slow movement, the Second Quartet, written during the winter of 1924-25 between the sketches and the orchestration of the despairing Second Symphony, seems to share its mood.