British composers of the nearly forgotten type like Cecil Armstrong Gibbs (1889-1960) enjoy posthumous good fortune because of the loyalty of British performers and listeners. At widely spaced intervals there have been releases of songs, string music, and symphonies by Gibbs reviewed in Fanfare, but this appears to be the debut on disc (counting only albums currently in print) of string quartets selected from the dozen or so that Gibbs composed.

Cambridge-educated, he was born into a prosperous family that manufactured soap and toothpaste—we learn from the engaging, discursive program notes that Gibbs SR toothpaste was the first product ever advertised on UK commercial television. He turned his back on the family business, choosing music instead, and eventually became a teacher at the Royal College of Music, where he had undertaken advanced studies at the urging of Adrian Boult. Vaughan Williams was one of his teachers. Gibbs’s output as a composer was so prolific across every genre, including church and choral music, that the booklet annotator wonders how he found time for anything else. “Yet he was also a crucial and leading figure in the Music Festival movement, a driving force in the remarkable improvement of standards in music education and performance in the United Kingdom that changed the musical life of the country out of all recognition.”

This leads one to expect music that is skillfully put together, shy of taking risks, only marginally modernist in proportion to a high quotient of traditional English style, and at worst, stuck in late-Victoriana. One might also anticipate that Gibbs produced too much for the market to absorb. For whatever reason, only about half of his dozen quartets were published or even performed. To some extent this was a personal choice: “Of the three full-scale examples on this recording, only the opus 8 A-Minor Quartet was performed in his lifetime, unlike the other two presented here for the first time. These two belong to a group described below as ‘inner works,’ clearly important to their author but not offered by him for either performance or publication.”

One of these inner works, the Quartet in C. op 95, dates from wartime 1940. The sunny major key supports the music’s pastoralism (Gibbs and his wife had relocated to the Lake District after their home in Essex was commandeered by the army for a convalescent home), but the anticipation of a ramble through the countryside is interrupted by anxious interjections that one readily connects to the war. Between its skill and an appealing melodic flow, it is hard to see why Gibbs withheld the work.

After Cambridge and two years before entering the Royal College of Music to study, Gibbs was a schoolmaster, which makes it remarkable that a prominent ensemble, the London String Quartet, premiered two of his quartets, including his op. 8 in A Minor from 1917. It is attractive and conservative, the thematic material easily followed by ear. Before calling the music not very memorable, it is worth remembering that this is the work of an amateur who finished it over Easter vacation when he had time free from his teaching duties. Gibbs makes teasing, insinuating, and at times poignant use of the minor key, creating a pensive mood until the livelier Allegro vivace section that ends the finale. It is interesting that he makes less use of folk-inspired material than a quarter century later in the C-Major Quartet.

The other “inner work” is the Quartet in E Minor that was written in October and November of 1958. Earlier that year Gibbs’s wife had died after a long illness, followed by Vaughan Williams, with whom Gibbs had been close. A son had died in combat in 1943. The program notes see the music in its melancholy setting. “The first movement opens with an insistent rhythm giving a sense of an obsessive tension. At times of difficulty, Gibbs always seemed to try to drive through them with a determined optimism about facing up to whatever life threw at him. The music reflects this, but stressful figurations repeatedly subvert the mood.” But there’s no striking emotion here and not much development, as I hear it, from the quartet that Gibbs wrote as an amateur. This is gentlemanly music that carefully controls what it wants to express.

In fact, Gibbs’s default response to life, as evidenced here, is elegiac; his approach could benefit from being less subdued. The program is filled out with a short suite of pastoral music inspired by the Lake District, Three Pieces for String Quartet, whose middle movement has attractive echoes of Brahms. For RVW’s 70th birthday, Gibbs sent A Birthday Greeting with affection and gratitude to his old teacher; the recipient liked this pastoral miniature enough to urge Gibbs to incorporate it into a larger work.

As to the performances, the Atchison Quartet is project-based, which means that first violin Robert Atchison gathered four equally experienced players to form an ad hoc group with the intent of recording this album. Their playing is good, but from the adherence to mezzo forte much of the time and the absence of involvement, I gather that more rehearsal time would have helped considerably. The recorded sound is fine, and I have already mentioned the readable program notes. This release is a nice example of how faithfully the British remember their own.