John Joubert, now in his mid-eighties, came to grim post-war London from South Africa on a Performing Right Society scholarship in 1946. He studied with Howard Ferguson at the Royal Academy of Music and gained a Royal Philharmonic Society Prize three years later; and no wonder, because his String Quartet No 1, Op 1, is a remarkable achievement for a student composer in 1950. In spite of references to the restless rhythms of Walton’s First Symphony, this is a thoroughly idiomatic and polished work. The Second Quartet is a reissue from a two-CD set with piano music and songs to mark Joubert’s 80th birthday in 2007. It draws on the motto in the finale of Beethoven’s Op 135 Quartet and the musical letters in Shostakovich’s name, D-E flat-C-B. The Adagio is an eloquent in memoriam to the Russian composer. The Third Quartet, a BBC commission from 1986, has a noble fugue opening the slow movement. The finale quotes from Joubert’s 1958 Piano Concerto – a reminder of his catalogue of substantial works including the recent English Requiem and Cello Concerto. These are excellent performances from the Brodsky; and it’s a fine recording, too.

Joubert’s Second Symphony (1970), using African themes, is an intense response to the Sharpeville massacre of 1960. The apartheid regime banned the work but Nelson Mandela later got the ban lifted. The music rises memorably to the occasion. The CD is completed with juvenilia: two excerpts from William Alwyn’s unfinished opera, written when he was 20 – echoing Delius and Vaughan Williams; and Carlo Martelli’s Symphony, written when he was 19. The Martelli, remarkably fluent in a mainstream idiom, was rapturously received in 1957, then forgotten. He originally wrote the final movement to stand alone but Malcolm Arnold suggested that he add two more. I’m not sure that it was the right thing to do but this performance more than makes amends.