Roberto Prosseda has already been rattling his way through Mendelssohn’s piano music for Italian Decca, and here he is joined by colleagues for a second disc of the composer’s early chamber music for piano and strings. It will come as a surprise to no one that the two piano quartets included on the release are jaw-droppingly precocious. The First dates from 1822, when Mendelssohn was 13, and, as the viola player Francesco Fiore’s expansive and learned booklet-notes remind us, greatly impressed Goethe. The Third was composed two years later; the strange little three minute-long Largo and Allegro dates from 1820.

As one would also expect, the music is unfailingly elegant, urbane and enjoyable, even if I’m not sure it’s always quite as interesting as Fiore suggests. However, this impression might in part be down to the performances, which, for all their sophistication and virtuosity, sometimes feel a touch bland. The engineering is clean and smooth, the string-playing reassuringly mellow, but Prosseda is sometimes in danger of going into virtuoso autopilot while reeling off the passagework and arpeggios that are such a feature, in the outer movements especially.

The greatest pleasures are to be had when those textures let up, such as in the wonderfully easy-going (and, as Fiore notes, Rossinian) second subject of the intermittently Beethovenian C minor First Quartet’s Allegro vivace, or in its melodious Adagio. The larger-scale B minor Third Quartet is more structurally ambitious and its grand finale builds up an impressive head of steam in the hands of Prosseda and his colleagues.