From everything we read about his long life, to a delightful photo in which he sits happily with Mr and Mrs Grieg and Percy Grainger at Troldhaugen in 1907, I get the impression that Julius Röntgen would have been a most congenial and engaging companion. Even if he remains a somewhat peripheral figure today, Nimbus is nevertheless to be commended for its interest in his copious music – most notably a continuing series devoted to the piano music played by Mark Anderson. The company now extends its focus to the three viola sonatas composed during 1924 and 1925 in sensitively sympathetic accounts by Austrian musicians Herbert Kefer and Markus Schirmer. Kefer founded the distinguished Artis Quartet in 1980, an ensemble sadly scheduled to bid farewell to the platform in December this year.

It would be all too easy to dismiss Röntgen’s idiom as old-fashioned and backward-looking. But in truth, why should he have tried to ape the developments that startled certain European centres during these years? After all, both Bruch and Saint-Saëns alike touched the late 1910s and early 1920s without altering their voices much, writing music valued today; Röntgen belongs to the generation of such diverse figures as Fauré, Janáček, Elgar and Puccini and in such a context needn’t feel out of place. So here are three essentially Romantic, beautifully written works, which make a well-balanced programme for repeated listening. The writing throughout is natural and fluent, working idiomatically with the grain of the instruments and never indulging in wayward effects. Brahms, whom Röntgen knew well, would surely have empathised with this approach and the performers respond with corresponding warmth and sympathy.

Although the three sonatas share a mood of gentle reflection and even of nostalgia within a classically orientated structural framework, closer listening reveals many subtle differences of mood and also of organic development. Kefer and Schirmer have an intuitive insight into this music, which they unfold with ease and empathy, and they breathe together with a genuine sense of chamber-like equality. These beautiful performances were warmly recorded at Nimbus’s Wyastone Leys concert hall in February last year and are the epitome of civilised music-making in the best European tradition.