A quick canter through the pages of Gramophone reveals that scant attention has been paid to Marcel Dupré’s chamber and piano music, composed before his career took off as an international virtuoso organist with his American debut at Wanamaker’s store in New York in 1921.

The Australian trio of violinist Philip Nixon, cellist Rosanne Hunt and pianist Harold Fabrikant – who also contributes an excellent essay on Dupré – offer three substantial works: a Violin Sonata, Op 5; Four Pieces for piano, Op 19, of which the ‘Cortège et Litanie’ is better known in the version for organ, and was transcribed by Dupré at the suggestion of his tour manager in America; and Six Preludes for piano, Op 12, the centrepiece and the finest work on the album. The brief Élévation, Op 2, opens the programme, as graceful an introduction as one could wish, the inner voice a reminder of its origin for harmonium or organ. The Three Pieces for cello, Op 13, are agreeable miniatures, evoking a warm-hearted response from Rosanne Hunt.

The somewhat clinical recording, in a studio in Melbourne, does unfortunately – but not exclusively – contribute to the sound picture, where in close-up the pianist and his fellow musicians reveal a samey approach to their interpretations, manifest from the word go in Fabrikant’s take-it-or-leave-it initial offering, the Élévation. In the Op 12 piano Preludes, Fabrikant’s agility on the keyboard is never in doubt, though it might come with a lighter touch, and it’s a shame he misses that moment to relish in the harmonic transition into a radiant F sharp major in the Sans lenteur, which could be expressed with greater tenderness. The performance of the Violin Sonata in G minor doesn’t escape such comment, though the ecstatic conclusion to the first movement in the tonic major is well done. All in all, then, a somewhat mixed response from this reviewer, a laudable enterprise, and one not likely to come this way again, tempered by a dogged, studied response to the music.