Amy Beach’s piano quintet proved a deservedly popular success in its early years. It makes a compelling—and surprising—match for Elgar’s own piano quintet: a late work contemporary with the cello concerto, and which inhabits the same emotional landscape.

'Loveliest of trees, the cherry now / Is hung with bloom along the bough, / And stands about the woodland ride / Wearing white for Eastertide.' Well, perhaps not. If the—conjectural—title of Paul Nash's The Cherry Orchard raises any expectations of a Housman-like idyll, these are swiftly dashed by the reality: gaunt, leafless branches stencilled against a chill winter sky; snowdrops in the bottom right-hand corner and a barbed wire fence (both just out of sight on our album cover)—an atmosphere of distinct unease prevails.

There is a parallel here with Elgar's Piano Quintet, a product of the same late flowering of creativity which also produced the Violin Sonata, String Quartet and Cello Concerto after years of silence. Writing in her diary about the opening of the Quintet, the composer's wife Alice noted its 'Wonderful weird beginning … evidently reminiscence of sinister trees & impression of Flexham Park … sad 'dispossessed' trees & their dance & unstilled regret for their evil fate'. Elgar himself described it as 'ghostly stuff'. The Quintet is more or less contemporaneous with the painting—though there is some debate about whether the painting dates from 1917 or 1914—and, whatever its inspiration, Nash's own 'sinister trees' seem a particularly apt illustration.