The humbling cover photograph shows a hat, an overcoat and a violin case resting on top of some baggage. One could,I suppose, say that the concept of ‘baggage’ underpins this whole enterprise, the baggage of history, of conscience, and of compassion for the persecuted. How could anyone hope to evaluate these exiled composers without bringing the potentially extenuating circumstances of the Holocaust into the equation? Impossible, I’d say, and Michael Haas’s booklet-note certainly throws down the gauntlet.

‘At the time of Hitler’s rise in 1933,’ he writes, ‘Jewish musicians were perhaps Germany’s most important living cultural assets.’ A strong and compassionate claim, with an understandably defiant tone – though Wilhelm Furtwängler, Walter Gieseking, Franz Lehár, Hans Pfitzner, Richard Strauss and a whole host of personages ‘from the other side’ (so to speak) inevitably suggest an alternative viewpoint. Ultimately one has to ask whether the works themselves will withstand posterity’s natural selection process, and I have to say that the evidence presented here is often impressive.

Hans Gál, for example, who landed on British shores in 1938, is a fine, communicative composer; his tightly knit, lyrical, Violin Sonata of 1920 is redolent of Strauss and Brahms, even Fauré. It is played here with the expressive shifts and tone production that reflect playing styles of the period. Nurit Pacht and Konstantin Lifschitz make an admirable partnership, as do baritone Christian Immler and Erik Levi, pianist, professor and expert on the whole complex business of music in the Third Reich. It would be difficult to surpass Immler and Levi in Gál’s subtle Fünf Melodien, their worlds running parallel with Strauss and early Berg, or Egon Wellesz’s equally imaginative Kirschblütenlieder, ‘Cherry Blossom Songs’.

Wellesz’s Octet of 1948 was commissioned by the Vienna Octet for a piece to programme alongside Schubert’s Octet and melds elements of musical flashback with more than a hint of Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony. Throughout this set one encounters an wide variety of texture, style, and musical mood. Franz Reizenstein’s 1934 Wind Quintet is both formally strong (echoes of Hindemith) and pleasing to the ear, whereas Matyás Seiber’s Violin Sonata is a tougher beast, knotty but often serene, and Berthold Goldschmidt’s Fantasy for oboe, cello and harp is quietly questioning. Both are late works. Then there’s Vilem Tausky’s heartfelt quartet Coventry – ‘a meditation’ on the bombing of that city – and the variously shaded shorter work of Peter Gelhorn, Karl Rankl and Leopold Spinner, all of which attest to a chorus of individual voices that could, and did, add significant ingredients to the UK’s musical heritage.

Playing standards are consistently high, the sound quality realistically reflects the sympathetic Wigmore Hall acoustic and Nimbus’s annotations are comprehensive. Th set takes just a few short steps along what I hope might become an extended road of musical discovery.