All is well with the world in these serenades by Gál and Krenek, which breathe the same Viennese air of good humour as exemplars of the form by Mozart, Brahms and Schoenberg. To usher comparatively unknown pieces into this exalted company requires the kind of sound musical instincts and technical finesse on show here.

Clarinettist Kilian Herold sets the tone and leads the line, but his colleagues play far more than supportive roles. Gál’s first movement steals in like Octavian to the Marschallin in her boudoir. Relaxed and jaunty subjects give way to one another with a graceful bow. The studio perspective sets the strings a little way back with due decorum but without smudging Gál’s immaculate counterpoint in the quicker movements. He was writing in 1937, cancelled by Germany and shortly to flee to London, but you would never guess this dire state of affairs from the music.

Krenek’s Serenade of 1919 belongs more noticeably to its turbulent times. The dialogue is pokier and knottier, the string-writing thicker, and a shadow of expressionism passes over its flickering introduction. The solo viola establishes a nocturnal mood of yearning in a distilled slow movement, like a four-minute Verklärte Nacht. Herold brings it to a point of extinction with masterful breath control before leaping into the spiky little Scherzo. Each time I hear a new work of Krenek, my appreciation rises. The tune for the fifth-movement Allegretto grazioso is charm itself, and winningly phrased in this first recording, which should by rights prompt a second and third.

There is not a dry or unmotivated bar in Krenek’s Serenade. I wish I could say the same about Penderecki’s Quartet. The piece has attracted no shortage of recordings for a piece written as recently as 1993, and Herold sensitively moulds the long opening Dorian-mode lament, with Barbara Buntrock’s viola articulate in response and Tanja Tetzlaff applying the thinnest line of ice on top. The following Soviet-style toccata and tiny Schoenbergian waltz also leave no corner unsympathetically turned, but the style is so synthetic, the invention second-hand, that the long final ‘Farewell’ lingers like a party guest in his cups. Pendereckians will doubtless dissent.