When we tot up the profit-and-loss account of Niels Gade’s bicentenary year in December, I fear it won’t be CPO’s admirable chamber music series that puts the Danish composer’s reputation in the black. In Vol 2 almost every piece was incomplete or rewritten from earlier material. In Vol 3 we have two movements of an unfinished Quartet in F and a single movement in A minor from Gade’s first attempt at quartet-writing in 1836.

Mercifully, the headline piece is Gade’s Octet, for which the strings of Ensemble MidtVest are joined by the Danish Quartet. The shadow of Mendelssohn looms over much of Gade’s output but here the point of comparison is more specific. Gade’s attempt to generate the same sort of youthful momentum as heard in Mendelssohn’s Octet only partly succeeds, first as his textures can get a little dense and second as his themes are almost always built for development rather than born of inspiration.

As noted before, sometimes when Gade takes one eye off Leipzig’s classical-romantic rulebook his music breathes more freely. The unfinished Quartet in F major, loosely based on ‘Willkommen und Abschied’, is a good example, with Gade evocatively capturing the sense of nervous anticipation of Schiller’s words.

Gade is rarely more charming than in that quartet’s slow movement but I feel this music marked Adagio needs a slower pace to indulge its sense of wonder. Still, Ensemble MidtVest sound warm and secure, with tender solos from Matthew Jones’s violin in the A minor movement, even if the Leipzig Quartet (MDG) are a little more virile. The Danish Quartet, playing mostly in ‘second’ chairs, blend well with their colleagues in the Octet but a closer sound that reveals the music’s weave might have aided the cause of a composer who is often more interesting under the surface than he is on top.