This disc is a most welcome addition to the catalogue of recordings of John Ireland’s chamber music (a rather neglected but superb corpus of deeply felt works) in that its principal focus is the range of pieces that the composer wrote for clarinet, played here with ravishing lyricism and conviction by Robert Plane, who has surely now fully occupied the shoes of the late Thea King in his championship of British clarinet music. Plane’s kinship with this music is clear from the more Brahmsian hues of the Sextet (1898), the limpid lyricism of The Holy Boy arrangement (1913), to the extrovert passion of the Fantasy Sonata for Clarinet (1943) where he is arguably at his most impressive.

Though the Sextet, a student work, betrays a deference to Brahms (not surprising since Stanford, his teacher, prescribed the model for all his students), there is a freshness and fluency about the material as well as a flair for the idiom, which compares favourably with those prodigious chamber works of Hurlstone, Coleridge-Taylor (both RCM fellow students) and, later, Frank Bridge. An attractive novelty on this CD is the Clarinet Trio which Ireland completed in 1913 but withdrew after two performances. Left incomplete and in manuscript at Ireland’s death, it has been reconstructed skilfully by Stephen Fox (using analogies with a later version for piano trio and a further reworking of the material for his Piano Trio No 3 of 1938). Plane, Alice Neary and Sophia Rahman give a sensitive reading of a style that is much more distinctly “Irelandesque” in its assimilation of French sonorities and sound-moments, Plane’s hushed playing being especially enthralling.