The musical style of the naturalised Englishman and banker Baron Frédéric Alfred d’Erlanger, born in Paris of a French father and American mother, remains an intriguing one. Trained in Paris under Anselm Ehmant, he enjoyed his first successes in opera but later turned to orchestral and chamber music, and many of his large-scale works were associated with the great virtuosos of the time such as Fritz Kreisler, who performed his Violin Concerto in 1903. Much of the polish, formal neatness and brilliant technical prowess brings to mind Saint-Saëns but at times the expansive lyrical manner of the composer’s personality is more reminiscent of Massenet, and occasional harmonic corners have that inventive surprise of Fauré’s first period of maturity.

A founder member of the Oxford and Cambridge Musical Club in 1899, Erlanger often appeared there as pianist in their regular Thursday soirées. Indeed, he often took part in the performance of his own chamber music, which included his Piano Quintet of 1901. First heard with the Kruse Quartet at the St James’s Hall on March 1, 1902, the work had a marked success and was heard again a few weeks later at the Bechstein Hall, where the composer also showed off his skill as an improviser. There is nothing shy about Erlanger’s big-boned first movement and its clear-cut sonata structure, nor the copious melodic ideas of the substantial slow movement with its grand, sweeping phrases. The much shorter Scherzo provides a more gothic, melodramatic interlude before the heroic style of the first movement returns in the finale, notable for its playful contrasting secondary theme which Lewis Foreman, in his informative notes, describes aptly as ‘dance-like’.

The Goldner Quartet and Piers Lane give a sonorous reading of Erlanger’s score and are equal to its muscular, sturdy temperament; indeed, Lane’s impressive execution of the piano part reminds us of just how dexterous a pianist the composer was. The ensemble sound throughout is lush and sympathetic, and never ceases to engage.

The somewhat less dense sound of Dunhill’s Piano Quintet, which appeared in 1904, three years after Erlanger’s, is no less voluptuous in its scoring, though one is perhaps aware of a greater sense of polyphonic freedom among the strings. There is also something poetically attractive about the flexible nature of the thematic material, in which all four players excel. This is particularly true of the first movement with its passionate climaxes, and the third movement (marked ‘Elegie’), whose brooding opening for low viola (redolent of Schumann) is heart-warmingly differentiated from the plaintive second subject. The attractive Scherzo, with its two ‘trios’, is played with panache and verve, and this same vitality, with a touch of debonair charm, returns in the appealing finale.