It’s not really fair to try and appraise an unfamiliar composer’s voice from a single selection of their works. So in releasing a second disc devoted to her music, Somm is helping the cause of the Australian-born composer and pianist Penelope Thwaites: probably best known as an interpreter of Percy Grainger, though if her own music is all as attractive as this, we ought to hear more. For now, the pieces in this collection are tonal, melodious light music in the tradition (and this is sincere praise) of Eric Coates or Madeleine Dring. In a more civilised age it would have been in every piano stool.

It’s 2023, though, and Thwaites has the advocacy of the Tippett Quartet and her fellow pianist Benjamin Frith, as well as her own formidable artistry at the keyboard. The quartet take the fore in Jan Palach’s Theme and For Irina: brief, expressive portraits of Eastern bloc dissidents written with a sincerity that leads Thwaites into some of the most impassioned (and indeed dissonant) music on the disc. Au tombeau de Chopin weaves an atmospheric fantasy for piano trio around a Chopinesque mazurka and the Indian-inspired Vijay’s Fable experiments (lightly) with microtonal spice.

Meanwhile Thwaites and Frith make delightfully animated partners in the toothsome waltzes and character pieces of A Lambeth Garland (adapted for piano duet from a song-cycle in honour of Rosalind Runcie, wife of the then-Archbishop of Canterbury) and the Wilde-inspired fairy tale suite for two pianos (shades of Coates here, too) The Selfish Giant. The pair also play with great vivacity and colour in Thwaites’s own two-piano transcription of Delius’s In a Summer Garden, all captured in clear and uncluttered recorded sound.