‘Dissonance wants to become consonance, it longs to be undone’, according to Bruno Walter, and in his own music it never has too long to wait. Rather than the eclectic menus served up by contemporary conductor-composers such as Furtwängler and Klemperer, both of them dangerous radicals by comparison, it is the rich goulash of Austro-Hungarian late-late-Romanticism exemplified by Dohnányi and Korngold to which these pieces owe their recipe.

Style is one thing, technique another, and it is a long while since I encountered a piece as vapid and unprepossessing as Walter’s 45-minute String Quartet of 1903. Each of the four movements overworks and outlasts its ideas, and perhaps Walter was aware of their intrinsic weakness in his haste to develop them from one strenuous episode into another.

Korngold’s father Julius gave the work a stinker of a review after its premiere by the Rosé Quartet, but the experience of writing it seems to have served Walter well for the Piano Quintet, composed the following year. Though the tendency to lapse into strident noodling is not altogether resisted in the outer movements, it is mostly more disciplined by stronger and more felicitous themes and more disciplined forms.

The Aron Quartet and Massimo Giuseppe Bianchi score over their rivals in the piece on Naxos by giving more breathing space and a gentle rhythmic lift to the Ruhig und heiter second movement, and then a muted palette of tone-colours and shadowy tension to the Geheimnisvoll third (more ‘secretive’ than ‘mysterious’ in this case), so that it wanders idiomatically somewhere between late Brahms and Mahler.

Even so, Walter’s own muse found a more natural outlet in song, to judge from a Brilliant Classics album of his lieder. The piano was his instrument, more than strings but still less than the baton, and his decision to drop composition entirely in 1910 is the mark of a man who knew his limitations.