This recording includes most of Thea Musgrave’s chamber works with oboe, including a recent spate of pieces inspired by the playing of Nicholas Daniel. All are on a modest scale: Night Windows (2007) and Take Two Oboes (2008) both consist of short character pieces ranging in length between one and four minutes, each evoking a given mood. The lyrical, one-movement Cantilena (2008) is the single most extended movement of the recital and the most overtly tonal work here. A Trio and two Impromptus are representative of an earlier atonal style from the 1960s whose musical argument seems more incisive, the instrumental writing more imaginative (to my ear, at least: there is for example some striking unison writing in the first Impromptu). That said, the pacing and control of materials is always most assured and makes for a contemporary recital that is both varied and approachable. The performances are on a similar level: it is no small matter to fashion a coherent programme out of a series of relatively small-scale works. The short oboe-and-tape piece Niobe (1987), though in a sense the odd one out, gives an idea of the composer’s considerable range.

Neither the composer nor her biographer allude to the comparatively recent turn to tonality mentioned above. An explanation of this might have been helpful for the general listener, who will encounter other (slightly mischievous) conundrums: what to make, for example, of the fact that all the recent, tonally orientated pieces end on the pitch C?