Reminding us that we are still in Walton centenary year, this excellent Hyperion issue brings together a wide-ranging group of his chamber works, from his earliest major work, the Piano Quartet, originally written when he was 16, to his last instrumental piece, the Passacaglia, which he composed for Rostropovich when he was nearly 80. As it happens, the Chandos Walton Edition also couples the early Piano Quartet and the Violin Sonata of 1947/49, but here you have a substantial bonus in the little song-cycle for tenor and guitar, Anon in Love, as well as the two shorter pieces.

That gives an immediate advantage to the new issue, and though some will prefer the weightier readings of those two major works on Chandos, the Nash versions are very winning; they are generally more volatile and spontaneous-sounding, no doubt reflecting the players’ experience of performing them in concert.

Helped by a not quite so immediate recording, the extra lightness and clarity brings an element of fantasy into such a movement as the Scherzo of the Piano Quartet and an extra tenderness into the lovely slow movement. More clearly than the rival version, this Nash performance seems to bring out the young composer’s debt to Herbert Howells’ Piano Quartet of 1916, which had just made its mark.

Nowhere else does Walton so enthusiastically use modal thematic material, starting with the mysterious opening theme, which the Nash players take very reflectively at a speed much slower than the movement’s main tempo, Allegramente. Both versions, in the finale, erupt in energetic reflection of the boy’s blatant echoing of the jagged repetitions in Stravinsky’s Petrushka. Despite these echoes, it is an astonishingly confident work for so young a composer, with adventurous writing for the strings that belies the fact that Walton was no string-player.

The Violin Sonata, a more elusive work, long underestimated, is given an equally persuasive performance, with Marianne Thorsen, accompanied by Ian Brown, freely expressive. The long first movement in sonata-form sounds more improvisatory than usual, and the equally expansive set of variations which combines the functions of slow movement, scherzo and finale has a similar freedom without sounding slack or aimless. It is helped by speeds generally faster and more fluid than those adopted by Kenneth Sillito and Hamish Milne.

As in the Chandos Walton Edition, John Mark Ainsley is totally undaunted by the taxing vocal writing of Anon in Love, originally designed for Peter Pears. This time he is rather more spontaneously expressive, though his vocal production is sometimes gusty, with legato not as smooth as before in the long opening setting of ‘Fain would I change that note’. Yet Craig Ogden is an ideal accompanist, totally idiomatic, adding sparkle to the vigorous songs in this offbeat collection.

Though Ian Brown gives a slightly sluggish account of Façade’s ‘Valse’ – in the awkward piano transcription ascribed to Walton himself – cellist Paul Watkins crowns the disc with a fine reading of the solo Passacaglia, drawing the disparate threads together.