Just over two decades ago, Niels W Gade’s 1864 Sextet was hailed in these pages as his ‘finest extended chamber work’. It’s a large-scale, well-organised piece with a Brahmsian sense of purpose and forward motion, if still possessing the lighter textures, and some of the early Romantic fantasy, of Mendelssohn and Schumann, Gade’s still inevitable poles of comparison. It’s well paced and balanced here by Ensemble MidtVest at the start of a CPO project to take in all of Gade’s many string-dominated chamber works. Rival performances from the Berlin Philharmonic String Octet (rather grand-sounding and stately) and the Johannes Ensemble are lying low at the moment, so proceed with confidence to this new reading, which has more Scandinavian air about it. But why did Gade completely rewrite the work’s first movement? You can dip into this mystery about his work now for yourself by listening to the (wholly) convincing and slightly shorter original. Was he seeking a closer (darker) match to what followed?

The F major Piano Trio (1863) – one of three Gade works for this instrumental line-up – has a greater lightness and sense of exhibition, especially in the piano part. Some may term this salon-ish but, to my ears, it reveals a regional kinship with Grieg. Gade is especially successful at blurring the dividing lines of conventional sonata-form structures (first and last movements) into a more continuous and rhapsodic-sounding whole. The Trio gets a well worked-in performance, especially from pianist Martin Qvist Hansen, and is helpfully more warmly and closely recorded than are an older rival, Tre Musici (Classico).

Gade is still better known here as a name on old posters who had something to do with Mendelssohn. These two performances can make a potent introduction to an interesting voice perched intriguingly on the borders of German Romanticism, Brahmsian neo-classicism and a growing Scandinavian nationalist school.