The oboe was Ruth Gipps’s main instrument (she studied with Leon Goossens and was at one time principal oboist in the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra), although she had been a concert-rank pianist in her youth. Her oboe-writing is demonstrated in the lovely Quintet, probably composed in 1941 or 1942 for herself and her husband, clarinettist Robert Baker, to play (they were married in 1942, shortly before he was called up for military service). The clarinet-writing here is also highly idiomatic – so, too, that for the three string players drawn from the Tippett Quartet – and this is a true dialogue between the five. Nonetheless, the oboe certainly holds a position of primus inter pares and is beautifully rendered here by Gareth Hulse.

The main focus on the disc is the clarinet, however, and Peter Cigleris is wholly within Gipps’s rich, warm-hearted idiom, whether in the Quintet or the Rhapsody with string quartet – the Tippett Quartet providing excellent support – composed in 1941, in which she shows herself at one with the English pastoral tradition without sounding at all like her mentor, Vaughan Williams. The engaging tone poem The Kelpie of Corrievreckan (c1940), another student piece, was the first written for her future husband and is a vibrant recounting of Charles Mackay’s poem about the predatory shapeshifter from Corrievreckan’s whirlpool who lures a feckless girl to her doom beneath the waves.

The later Prelude for unaccompanied bass clarinet (1957) is outwardly more abstract but no less expressive, full of vivid mood changes after a lugubrious opening. Finest of all is the Cobbett Prize-winning Sonata (1956), rightly hailed by booklet annotator Robert Matthew-Walker as ‘one of the finest such works by any British composer’. Cigleris and accompanist Duncan Honeybourne are ideal executants in an account I cannot see being bettered any time soon. Somm’s sound is unobtrusively superb. Recommended.