Every item on this absorbing collection of piano music by Herbert Howells is a first recording. There are plenty of captivating finds, too, not least the seven pieces that make up the 1911 Summer Idyls. These were part of a portfolio that helped secure the gifted teenager an open scholarship to the Royal College of Music (where he became a great favourite of Parry and Stanford). Matthew Schellhorn lends them immaculately stylish, raptly concentrated and memorably tender advocacy (‘June-Haze’ and ‘Down the Hills’ form a delectably limpid diptych in their own right), just as he is wholly attuned to the distinctly Ravelian soundscape of the exquisite 1917 Phantasy and endearing whimsy of Harlequin Dreaming from the following year (which annotator Jonathan Clinch surmises may well be a portrait of Howells’s dear friend, Arthur Bliss).

Pianist colleagues at the RCM (where Howells taught from 1920 until the late 1970s) were the lucky recipients of the Siciliana (1958), Pavane and Galliard (a powerful offering from 1964, exhibiting an especially penetrating harmonic scope) and Petrus Suite (1967-73). Disarmingly clean-cut and playful by turns, the last-named bears a dedication to Hilary Macnamara; thematic material from the concluding ‘Toccatina’ can be traced back to a sketch dated Easter Sunday 1921 (it also resurfaces in the Sonatina for piano of 1971). That just leaves the pithy My Lord Harewood’s Galliard from 1949 – all that survives of a wedding gift for the Earl of Harewood and his first wife, Marion Stein (a former pupil of Howells) – and the piercingly expressive Finzi: His Rest, one of two memorials to the composer written on the same day (the other, entitled ‘Finzi’s Rest: For Gerald on the Morrow of 27th September 1956’, found a home in the collection Howells’ Clavichord, published in 1961).

Boasting exemplary production values, this superbly performed survey constitutes a copiously rewarding voyage of discovery; in fact, I’m already itching to hear the second volume!