In previous reviews of the Belgian Joseph Jongen’s music I’ve suggested that he responded well to smaller forces and that perhaps his best music might date from the latter part of his life. The two works recorded here are both early, the Quartet being completed in 1902, the Trio five years later, so I wasn’t expecting too much. While I wouldn’t say either is an outright success, I found quite a lot more in them second time through, once I’d refamiliarised myself with Jongen’s leisurely thought processes.

Loving Messiaen’s music as I do, I’ve never classed myself as exactly an impatient listener, but my main problem with Jongen is the one Stravinsky had with Bruckner: I’m turning pages way ahead of the music. The Quartet in particular unrolls its 48-minute length steadily and with few surprises, borne along by continuous figuration, mainly in the piano, and while the opening of the first movement is dramatic, it is perhaps too much so. If you begin a movement over 10 long repeated F sharps, you may be giving a sensible indication of the scale of what is to come, but you then have to find ways of increasing the tension from what already sounds suspiciously like a development section.

I found the Trio altogether easier going, because the lighter texture draws Jongen away at times from his somewhat tortured, Chaussonesque introspection. In Jongen’s hands this unusual combination of instruments works rather well, removing the fin-de-siècle propensity to do obeisance to the cello’s characteristic noblesse.

The piano is recorded a little dominantly, and I could have done with more give in Diane Andersen’s phrasing – in the Trio, the solos in the second and third movements give a slight impression of strain, and in the Quartet the absence of much vertical ‘air’ means one could do with some in the horizontal dimension. But the string playing is excellent, and listeners who don’t have a bus to catch may well find this disc gives them pleasure.