It is unassailable that, despite his lack of prolificness, Chausson’s music is always intelligent and engaging as well as being full of nuance and influence. The early chromaticism in it, too, is very appealing, despite stopping short of Debussy’s inventiveness, at the same time as keeping one foot firmly in the Romantic past.

The Quarteto Lopes-Graça is an impressive line-up of some of Portugal’s best-known chamber musicians, and the playing on this disc is inviting and lyrical in a way that shows that they are warmly engaged with their performance. But it is all very closely miked, especially for the solo violin, whose tone – which is, in fact, sweet and beautiful – becomes relentless in the face of such over-exposure, and the balance very quickly becomes a distracting issue. Although it was definitely Chausson’s intention that the violin and piano stand properly proud of the full ensemble (and it is also the case that the string quartet part is largely quite sketchy), the close miking of the violin in particular places it at such a distance from the rest of the players that when the tuning slips ever so slightly, as it does fairly often, it is magnified into a problem that divides the musical forces and breaks up the overall effect (at the same time as picking up a large amount of offputting sniffing and heavy breathing).

These problems aren’t quite so pronounced in the Poème, which is a smaller-scale work (in this iteration, anyway – it was originally written for violin and orchestra and reproduced in different versions by an under-confident Chausson, who did not believe himself up to the task of a concerto) and managed more effectively by the violinist and pianist, who find in it more space to collaborate.