Bracingly inventive: Phantasy by the Piatti Quartet reviewed

You think you know a musical genre; then a new recording comes along and pulls something unexpected out of the bag. Walter Willson Cobbett (1847-1937) was an improbable culture-hero; a belt tycoon from Blackheath who devoted his spare time (and most of his profits) to domestic music-making, commissioning major British composers of his day and editing the single most readable reference book ever written about chamber music.

Two ‘Phantasies’ from Cobbett’s competitions – reasonably familiar masterpieces of English pastoralism by Vaughan Williams and Herbert Howells – are the starting point for this imaginative disc from the Piatti Quartet. But this being the Piattis (whose previous recordings feature music by Ned Rorem, Joseph Phibbs and Naresh Sohal), that’s just the entrance to the rabbit hole.

Follow them down, and you’ll discover a curiosity cabinet stuffed with quartet bric-à-brac, including a tiny sculptural tribute to Stravinsky by Michael Tippett and a complete single-movement string quartet by the teenage Malcolm Arnold. It’s bracingly inventive. The Piatti Quartet play with unsentimental directness and a silvery ensemble tone, delivering alert, atmospheric performances of 20th-century gems which in several cases I had no idea even existed.

The real pearl is a pair of songs by the Irish composer Ina Boyle: a brooding, austere Edith Sitwell setting (sung by Sharon Carty) and an ancient Greek lament (with the tenor James Gilchrist), which apparently won an award at the 1948 London Olympics. Imagine that! A time when the Olympics still pretended to give a monkey’s about culture. I’ll take Ina over Danny Boyle, any day.