Seekers after the unusual will almost certainly light on the Quintet by Jean Émile Paul Cras (1879-1932), a composer who was, I confess, completely unknown to me before this disc arrived. A rear admiral in the French navy, Cras seems to have written a fair quantity of music, with the opera Polyphème awarded a prize by the City of Paris in 1921. The Quintet, scored for flute, harp and string trio, dates to 1928, and the members of the Horenstein Ensemble give a performance that would be thoroughly persuasive if the music itself were stronger. The effect is of a composer trying to be individual but lacking the personality to escape the pervading influences of much more potent forces. Thus Debussy and Ravel hover not merely in the background but loom over the foreground as well. Something akin to the violin-writing of Stravinsky’s L’histoire du soldat pops up in the first movement and the occasions when the music does acquire some character of its own derive from what sound like the rhythms and melodic inflections of North Africa.

The Quintet perhaps indicates that Cras did not have an infallible instinct for disciplining his ideas, in marked contrast to Herbert Howells’s wisely structured and eloquently expressed Rhapsodic Quintet for string quartet and clarinet. The Horenstein play it beautifully, as they do Vaughan Williams’s Merciless Beauty, with Fionnuala McCarthy as the sensitive soprano.