I’ve long regarded Frank Bridge’s comprehensive 1912 revision of his D minor Piano Quintet from seven years before as the sole comparative dud in his early chamber output – and not even this splendidly articulate rendering from Piers Lane and the Goldners can persuade me otherwise. The original work’s four movements are condensed to three, its centrepiece a gratefully lyrical amalgam of slow movement and scherzo enclosed within one of Bridge’s arch-like “phantasy” structures. Alas, the opening movement (after a promising start) soon drifts into a worryingly humdrum, sequential lassitude, and the finale fails to provide sufficient ballast to counterbalance what has preceded it.

The Three Idylls of 1906 (dedicated to Bridge’s bride-to-be, Ethel) are an infinitely more enticing proposition – exquisitely crafted, keenly proportioned and supremely touching miniatures for string quartet, the second of which later provided the 23-year-old Britten with the theme for his Op 10 Variations for string orchestra. The Fourth Quartet is utterly different again. Completed in 1937 after a near-fatal bout of bronchitis, this is arguably Bridge’s most rivetingly cogent and harmonically bracing statement, evincing a deftness, compassion and unerring intellectual scope that beg comparison with the greatest 20th-century examples in the medium.

These unfailingly sympathetic, flexible and exhilaratingly assured performances (that of the Quartet, on balance, the finest to date) have been most truthfully captured by the microphones; Bridge’s cataloguer Paul Hindmarsh provides the scholarly annotation. So, despite my purely musical strictures surrounding the Quintet, this is clearly a release to investigate, as well as a distinguished addition to the steadily growing Bridge discography.