The Catalyst Quartet certainly live up to their name. The musicians are devoted to changing the way audiences perceive classical music. They embrace a spectrum of composers, including many of colour who deserve far greater attention in performance and on recordings than they’ve received. The first volume of their newest recording project, ‘Uncovered’, is an illuminating programme of music for string quartet, piano and clarinet by the Afro-British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912), who was a teenage student at the Royal College of Music in London when he wrote these works.

Like Mozart and Mendelssohn, Coleridge-Taylor showed artistic maturity at an extraordinarily young age. Before moving on to write such large works as The Song of Hiawatha and A Tale of Old Japan, he penned beguiling chamber music suffused with Central European Romanticism. The influence of Brahms and especially Dvořák can be discerned in the robust and lyrical pieces the Catalyst Quartet play with gleaming commitment. But Coleridge-Taylor, who was admired by Elgar, was no mimic: these works show a musical mind of fervent imagination.

The earliest piece, the Quintet in G minor for piano and strings (c1893), immediately introduces the composer’s heightened abilities in the first movement’s bold opening thrusts. Strings and piano go on to share material of intense feeling and often folk-like personality. The album’s two other works, from 1895, are equally vibrant in inventiveness and poetic warmth. In the five Fantasiestücke, the string quartet engages in charming and pensive musings full of Bohemian inspiration, while the Clarinet Quintet is perhaps the richest of the three, with a slow movement that reaches the sublime.

The performances, captured with intimate clarity, couldn’t be more loving. The Catalyst Quartet – whose second violinist on this recording, Jessie Montgomery, is developing an important career as a composer – play with sophistication and animation, and they collaborate with two exceptional musicians, pianist Stewart Goodyear and clarinettist Anthony McGill. Next up in the series is an album of works by Florence Price, to be followed, the booklet notes promise, by volumes devoted to Joseph Boulogne Chevalier de Saint-Georges, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, William Grant Still and George Walker.