It’s always good to see the music of Ernst von Dohnányi paired with his more celebrated contemporaries. There was more than one path in 20th-century Hungarian music, after all, and chronologically speaking, Dohnányi’s Second Piano Quintet of 1914 is actually the more modern of the two works recorded here. Its composition coincided with the outbreak of war which, by all accounts, Dohnányi saw as no great reason to interrupt his Alpine holiday (a new love affair might have also been a factor).

There’s nothing idyllic or unruffled about the work itself, though: a tormented, tempest-tossed epic that holds its own – both in scale and strength of personality – alongside the young Bartók’s gloriously red-blooded Quintet of 1904. These are ardent, uncompromising readings that don’t stint on the dissonance or the craggy grandeur in either work, with an accelerating, folk-like Schwung in the finale of the Bartók (when the composer sounds as if he’d been on the pálinka) and an almost symphonic sweep and scale in the Dohnányi. Giacometti and the Zemlinskys find a pregnant ‘night music’ atmosphere in Bartók’s slow movement: you can sense the incipient thunder.

But both these works have been recorded elsewhere in more attractive sound and with playing of greater finesse: on Hyperion (11/19, 2/20) and, in the case of the Bartók, in a Gramophone Award-winning performance on Alpha (10/19). By comparison with either, Evil Penguin’s recorded sound is unflattering to the strings (who sound distinctly wiry) while the piano seems to move back and forth in the sonic picture. But if the pairing appeals, these interpretations certainly aren’t lacking in spirit.