The close academic and latterly informal relationship between Gustav Holst and Cecil Coles underpins this release of their piano music, reminding one of the former’s questing evolution and the latter’s tragically unfulfilled potential as yet another casualty of the First World War.

The rapid development of Coles under Holst’s tutelage at Morley College can be gauged by these two sets of variations – the lucid and academically correct (never to a fault) unfolding of Variations on an Original Theme against the Five Little Variations on an Original Theme, pithier yet far richer in incident and an object lesson in ‘less is more’. The Sonata in C minor seems not to have progressed beyond its first two movements, a trenchant sonata-allegro and an Andante modelled on that from Beethoven’s Pathétique. The delightful evocative contrasts of the Five Sketches parallel Frank Bridge’s pre-war morceaux, while the three salon miniatures include Triste et gai with its adroit switching between moods of subtly inflected expression.

Almost all of Holst’s mature piano pieces are featured here. As Nigel Osborne suggests in his astute annotations, the medium offered direct means of exploring the harmonic and tonal possibilities that preoccupied the composer after The Planets; in his adaptations of folk songs and carols, or in those archaic modal processes reimagined for the present in Toccata or the Nocturne and Jig. Most impressive is Egdon Heath, heard in an idiomatic and resourceful arrangement by Iain Farrington that unerringly conveys the ominous remoteness but also the enduring permanence in Thomas Hardy’s terrain of the imagination to masterly effect.

Throughout, James Willshire is the assured and probing exponent of music that, at its best, ought to feature in the repertoire of many more pianists than is presently the case. Superbly detailed sound does justice to his Steinway D, confirming a warmly recommended release.