Mélanie Bonis was born in Paris in 1858. A student of Franck and Guiraud, Debussy and Pierné were her peers at the Conservatoire and Saint-Saëns an admirer. Her early works were well received and she won a number of prizes, but her strict Catholic parents forced her to give up her budding musical career and marry a wealthy, widowed industrialist. She died in the same year as Ravel and Roussel, 1937.

Despite a busy life as mother to eight children and stepchildren, Bonis managed in fits and starts to compose nearly 300 works, almost exclusively chamber, instrumental and vocal pieces including two piano quartets and the pleasant diptych Soir, matin for piano trio. The “evening” section is fairly ordinary salon music but Matin is delightful, a quasi-impressionist mini-tone-poem dating from the early 1900s.

The two Quartets present Bonis’s serious, abstract side. No 1 also dates from the early 1900s and is the work that so deeply impressed Saint-Saëns at its premiere (which featured Pierre Monteux, no less, on viola). Cast in the traditional four movements, it is sunny and relaxed with a classical balance evident from the opening bar. The Second (1927, dedicated to Pierné) is more sombre, a valedictory signing-off to an intermittent lifetime of music-making. If the music lacks anything, it is – crucially – a really distinctive personal voice. The legacy of Franck is manifest, but sounds here not unlike the youthful and stylistically anonymous chamber effusions of a Nielsen or Sibelius. The Mozart Piano Quartet provide these works with enthusiastic advocacy and MDG’s sound is a model of clarity and natural balance – just like Bonis’s music.