Here’s an enterprising programme from Quatuor Giardini. The marketplace is quite crowded where Fauré’s First Piano Quartet is concerned. While tempi are generally well chosen in this new version, others bring out the work’s highly contrasting moods to better effect. In the first movement, Eric Le Sage et al are more confiding in its more inward passages, while Domus are notably quick on their feet, which goes for the Scherzo second movement too. The Beaux Arts prove that speed is not everything here, combining a tempo that allows detail to tell with a delightful sense of interaction.

But the real test in this work is the mournful slow movement. Eric Le Sage and his colleagues are masterly here, alongside which the Giardini sound somewhat pallid. The Beaux Arts, several degrees warmer, engage more, as does the Capuçon/Caussé/Dalberto recording, though that is compromised by a swimmy acoustic. In the finale, the fingeriness of Le Sage and Domus’s Susan Tomes pays dividends, and both ensembles find more contrast with the martial elements than do the Giardini.

However, any group championing the music of Mel Bonis has to be applauded. She lived a long and colourful life, though constantly had to battle to be taken seriously as a composer. When Saint-Saëns heard her First Piano Quartet, he unwittingly summed up her situation: ‘I would never have thought a woman was capable of writing that.’ It’s a substantial and hugely imaginative piece, full of adventurous harmonies. Unfortunately it doesn’t get the best airing here – the string tuning isn’t always spot-on and I felt the Giardini could have made more of the striking textures of the Intermezzo and the swirling climaxes of the Andante, which has some extraordinary touches of whole-tone exoticism towards its close. There’s already a fine reading of this piece by the Mozart Piano Quartet but there’s certainly room for more.