While Korngold’s 21st-century rehabilitation as a serious composer seems well and truly complete, it’s fair to say that his chamber music is the section of his output that’s still slightly playing catch-up. Notable exceptions do exist, though, such as the Doric Quartet’s 2010 recording of the three quartets (Chandos, 11/10).

The Eusebius Quartet open the current album in partnership with pianist Alasdair Beatson in Korngold’s early, luxurious-textured Piano Quintet in E – composed in 1921 simultaneously with his String Quartet No 1, shortly after the completion of his opera Die tote Stadt. At the end of the programme there’s his String Quartet No 2, composed in 1933 just as Hitler rose to power in Germany – and thus a year before Korngold fled to Los Angeles. In between is an even-lesser-spotted offering, Korngold’s quartet arrangement of the incidental music he began writing in 1918, aged 21, for a local Vienna theatre company’s production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, which premiered to such success in 1920 that its run extended beyond the period the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra members were booked, necessitating the creation of a reduced score for two violins and piano. A four-movement orchestral suite followed but it wasn’t until 2012 that the unpublished manuscript of a string quartet version was discovered, covering just three of its movements. This again is clearly Viennese fare, translating charmingly well into concert music even in its most programmatic moments; and in these particular readings, even Dogberry and Verges’s drunken march sounds decidedly less spiky and more refined than it often does. The Eusebius also offer a bonus, having commissioned pianist Tom Poster to arrange for them the missing dreamy Intermezzo movement, which they glide through with clear, slender-toned pleasure.

In fact, the readings as a whole sit at the softly romantic end of things: textures lucid, tempos leisurely and everything feeling very elegant. I find myself gravitating to the brighter energy and swifter tempos heard from the Doric in the quartet; and there is tough competition for the quintet, notably the edge-of-the-seat volatility that Alexander Mogilevsky and friends brought to it in 2010 from Martha Argerich’s Lugano Festival (EMI/Warner, 6/11). That’s personal taste, though. Certainly what the Eusebius deliver here is convincing and stylish.