The ‘Music in Exile’ series led by the Toronto-based ARC Ensemble has turned up several worthwhile discoveries among those Jewish composers who fled the Nazis in the 1930s, principal among them Walter Kaufmann (who settled in Bombay; 10/20) and Jerzy Fitelberg (New York; 11/15). As the ensemble’s indefatigable researcher and artistic director Simon Wynberg explains in his generously extensive notes, Hamburg-born Robert Müller-Hartmann (1884-1950) and his family came to make their home in the less exotic locale of Dorking, having won the friendship and support of Vaughan Williams.

Dating from around 1923, the opening Violin Sonata makes a pleasant if not especially persuasive case for his revival, being fluently and generically lyrical in a post-Brahmsian style. A Meditation and Elegy for cello and piano follow in the same vein. More distinctive and less imbued with nostalgia is the Sonata for two violins: 12 minutes and four movements packed with incident in a Bach-meets-Bartók style. Bittersweet harmony colours the even more concentrated set of Three Intermezzi and Scherzo.

Wynberg detects an ‘incipient Englishness’ in Müller-Hartmann’s music even before he left Germany, and this modal strain emerges to best effect in the second of his three string quartets. No 2 opens with an Andante tranquillo, and a long, unwinding theme that strikingly anticipates his encounter with VW. The surefootedness of his technique is not in doubt elsewhere but here it blooms in memorably expressive form. These first recordings are no less well prepared, scrupulously engineered and sympathetically played than previous volumes in the series. If the album stirs up interest in the other two string quartets, so much the better.