Recent releases such as song-cycles by Robert Hugill (Navona, 1/18) or the Celtic-inspired miscellany ‘Between Earth and Sea’ (Tyˆ Cerdd) confirmed Rosalind Ventris as a viola player with whom to reckon, and this first recital accordingly underlines her technical prowess and breadth of sympathies.

After the tensile energy of a piece by Grażyna Bacewicz comes the only work Lillian Fuchs wrote for her instrument, its two movements taking in an opulent Fantasia then a Pastorale whose ruminative poise alternates with robust impetus before the decisive close. Amanda Feery offers a study in emotional remoteness well suited to its Antarctic inspiration, and Sally Beamish one whose technical panache amply underlines her own ability as viola player.

Elisabeth Lutyens and Elizabeth Maconchy are represented by works that find their thinking at its most characteristic. That by Lutyens typifies her later output in its refractory gestures and an innate continuity that motivates its nominally fugitive progress. That by Maconchy is a series of vignettes whose brevity does not exclude a methodical progress, where motifs from one piece are transformed in another and any flights of fancy underpinned by formal rigour.

Whether Imogen Holst might have achieved comparable status had composing not regularly taken a back seat, her work exudes warm lyricism and technical finesse, allied to a nimble humour, to make its revival worthwhile. Of the pieces by Thea Musgrave, the first tellingly evokes that tendency towards ‘instrumental drama’ with which she is most associated, then the latter renders memories of the pandemic from an ultimately life-affirming perspective.

With sound that brings out the full timbral and expressive range of the musician’s playing, this adds up to a consistently impressive statement of intent as well as a persuasive overview of music which, in the words of Ventris herself, ‘just happens to be by women composers’.