This sensitive, not to say compelling recording does much to remind us that Imogen Holst (1907-84) was, throughout her life, a serious composer, and though her music does not evidence the same original voice as her father’s, the chamber works, sympathetically performed here, nevertheless reveal a craftsmanship and fertile imagination. The student Phantasy Quartet (1928), which won the Cobbett Prize, is a well proportioned multi-sectional essay, its modal harmony and pastoral manner sharing much with Howells’s work entered for the same competition. By 1930 it is clear that, besides a more dexterous technique, she had become more affected by French pointillism in the Sonata for violin and cello (the influence of Ravel’s own work for the same forces is in evidence), which is more angular and, with its sparing textures, thematically more economical. By the String Trio No 1 of 1944 a more astringent, tonally extended language (redolent perhaps of Rawsthorne) is in operation, as is a more carefully honed syntax of contrasting tonal polarities and bitonal techniques (which she may well have learnt from her father). Less successful than the Trio, the later The Fall of the Leaf (a rare work for solo cello) and Duo for viola and piano which lies on the cusp of dodecaphony continue this trend, while in the warmer String Quintet (with second cello), composed as late as 1982 and inspired by scenes of the River Thames, one senses a return to the post-Romantic parlance of the earlier works, especially in the touching Theme and Variations, where the theme was borrowed from the last entry in Gustav Holst’s notebook, dated January 26, 1934, written four months before his death.