The first work you’ll hear on this absorbing CD was composed by a 24-year-old who worked as an assistant conductor to Bruno Walter and Hans Knappertsbusch. Munich-born Paul Frankenburger, as he was then, had soaked up the influences of Brahms, Fauré and Reger, all of whose works are at one time or another echoed in the Piano Quartet, Op 4. The music’s spirit suggests a clean bill of health to contrast with the feverish outpourings of Vienna’s hothouse fin de siècle, the expansive finale in particular, bold music, assertive and impressively varied in tone and incident.

Frankenburger became Ben-Haim after the lamentable developments in Nazi-dominated Europe prompted his emigration to Palestine (later Israel), which is where the remainder of the works programmed by the ARC players were composed. The Two Landscapes for viola and piano and Improvisation and Dance for violin and piano both date from 1939 and take us on a route where Bartók and Enescu reside somewhere close by, though Ben-Haim’s style has a distinctively lyrical slant all its own. If Bloch evokes the spirit of Jewish prayer and (occasionally) ritual, Ben-Haim more suggests the world of dance and outdoor celebration.

The Clarinet Quintet (1941, rev 1965) melds a highly sophisticated musical design with more than a hint of klezmer-influenced improvisation. By then Ben-Haim was apparently happy that he had consolidated a ‘new style’, and the evidence quietly but firmly extends the language of the genre. Superb playing by the members of the ARC Ensemble, excellent sound and useful booklet-notes by Simon Wynberg.