Here is a disc to delight anyone who has enjoyed Nielsen’s incomparable autobiography, My Childhood on Fyn, and who has wondered what kind of music he was composing at the time. Everything here, apart from the arrangement of the Op 2 oboe Romance, comes from the seven-year period leading up to his well known Op 1 Suite for Strings in which Nielsen’s personal voice first emerged – charmingly but firmly – beside the influences of Brahms, Grieg and Svendsen. On the path towards that breakthrough piece we can follow him through the elementary Mozartean style of the G major Violin Sonata (which lacks a finale) and the A major Duet, through the more Beethovenian D minor Quartet (the work that Nielsen showed Gade when he petitioned for entry to the Copenhagen Conservatoire), via the Romance for violin in a more contemporary – which is to say soft-centred romantic – idiom, up to the more ambitious quartet movements that featured in his first public appearances as composer.

It would be wishful thinking to find anything very prophetic of the mature Nielsen in any of these works. But their documentary interest is obvious, and they are all beautifully played and recorded here (the disc is a companion to Demertzis and Asteriadou’s fine accounts for BIS of the mature violin works, 12/03). The catalogue still lists rival versions on the Kontrapunkt label, which are also finely played, if you can find them.