SOMM RECORDINGS’ coupling of string quartets by teacher and pupil William Alwyn and Doreen Carwithen offers a revealing glimpse – in illuminating performances by the Tippett Quartet – into the relationship between a master composer and his promising student who became one of the great ‘what might have beens’ of British 20th-century music. Alwyn’s position as a leading British composer was cemented by his prolific output (totalling more than 500 scores) while Carwithen abandoned composing altogether to act as Alwyn’s amanuensis and secretary, eventually becoming his wife in 1975. Composed in 1948, Alwyn’s atmospherically charged Three Winter Poems are charming works that benefit from the evocative, emotional immediacy that characterised his cinema scores.While the prolific Alwyn composed 16 string quartets, Carwithen produced just two, both early in her career, both displaying, says Knowles, 'a remarkably sound technique and a natural sense of warm emotion and drama', and both heard here in only their second recording.