Here’s another feast for admirers of Herbert Howells (1892-1983), a second volume of piano music marvellously played by Matthew Schellhorn, and with all but one item – the deeply touching 1920 miniature The Chosen Tune – receiving their first recordings. The programme spans some 63 years, from a clutch of five agreeably Griegian offerings written before the precocious teen had left his home county of Gloucestershire to study at the Royal College of Music, to the superb late Sonatina composed for Hilary Macnamara (and first heard at her Wigmore Hall debut on January 24, 1972). Always, it would seem, a work in progress, the latter is heard in Schellhorn’s own new edition, which incorporates additional material harvested from at least 10 different manuscript sources. Its searching centrepiece (originally labelled Sarabande) will haunt you for days, while the heart of the last movement now imparts an uneasy stillness that stops me in my tracks every time (thematic material for this Toccata, by the way, dates from as far back as 1921 and also crops up in the concluding Toccatina of the Petrus Suite that Schellhorn included on Vol 1 – 9/20).

Macnamara was also the dedicatee of the haunting Et nunc, et semper from 1967 (which bears the subtitle Quasi menuetto), while four years earlier pianist Margaret Bruce was the lucky recipient of Comme le cerf soupire … – a transcription of Howells’s own riveting improvisation on an old French song. Endearing, too, are those two sets of teaching pieces from 1928, Country Pageant (presented here for the first time in its entirety) and A Little Book of Dances (shades of Warlock’s Capriol Suite in its use of old dance forms), which are followed in turn by a sequence of pieces for children composed during the 1930s, the Minuet that ‘Father HH’ wrote in 1935 for his daughter Ursula being especially disarming.

Once again, I’m happy to be able to report that Schellhorn is affectionately appreciative of Howells’s idiomatic keyboard-writing. What’s more, both annotation (Jonathan Clinch and Schellhorn himself) and production (Simon Weir working with sound engineer Ben Connellan in The Menuhin Hall) give absolutely no cause for complaint. In all, an undoubted treat.