Henry Walford Davies is a name known to us now for Solemn Melody and small-scale church pieces such as ‘God be in my head’. Yet he was the most promising of students, an impression affirmed by Brahms when Davies visited him in 1896, and by the pioneer of new chamber music in London, Edward Dannreuther, who performed Davies’s Piano Quartet at his studio at 12 Orme Square, Bayswater. Although much of Davies’s symphonic instrumental thinking was embodied in his earlier chamber works of the 1890s and early 1900s, he never forgot these essays, as the Piano Quintet in G of 1927 elucidates. This is a work of big gestures (for which the Tippett Quartet and Lynn Arnold show commendable sympathy), redolent of Davies’s former composition teacher, Parry. The opening idea for unison strings and piano establishes the quasi-orchestral nature of the three-movement scheme much in the same vein as Fauré’s Piano Quintet No 2. One senses also, with the absorbing central movement, Davies’s fertile interest in two-dimensional organisation, the series of five substantial variations representing a set of individual movements with a finale that then seamlessly runs into the finale proper.

For anyone interested in music in the north-east of England in the early 20th century, the name of Alfred Wall turns up frequently, given his position as a teacher at the Newcastle Conservatoire and, if only for a short time, a degree of fame as a prizewinner for the UK Carnegie Trust with his Piano Quartet in C minor in 1920, when others such as Howells, Bridge, Stanford and Vaughan Williams were also having their work published under the same auspices. The quartet is a big-boned piece, perhaps almost over-ambitious in its scale and development of ideas, but it is rich in invention and, for all its conservative post-Romantic Brahmsian idiom, there is an individual freshness about the thematic material of all three movements (the central movement adeptly elides slow movement and scherzo) and a genuine understanding of the piano-quartet idiom that encourage repeated listening.

Something of a specialist in chamber music, Susan Spain-Dunk has largely disappeared from the repertoire even though at one time she boasted a reputation to equal that of Ethel Smyth. A student in the ‘hot house’ of Royal Academy composers such as Bowen, Dale and Bax during the early 20th century and who rubbed shoulders with that extraordinary group of pianists who studied with Tobias Matthay, she deserves to be better known. Her close associations with Walter Willson Cobbett encouraged her to favour one-movement ‘fantasy’ forms, and this shorter Piano Quartet (of around 12 minutes), conjectured to have been composed around 1920, has all the hallmarks of that cyclic structural tradition advocated by Cobbett and his famous chamber-music prize. Spain-Dunk unashamedly looks back to late Romanticism as the mainstay of her musical language but a diverting facet of her thematic style (notably more than one hears, for example, in the Wall Quartet) is an unapologetic nod towards popular song, which one hears in the structural culmination of the work.

Hats off to the Tippett Quartet for giving these rare chamber works an airing and for performances of charm, insight and real enthusiasm. It would be interesting to know if any of these works form part of their concert programmes.