Edinburgh Quartet

IT IS TEMPTING to say that Robert Crawford wasted three decades of his compositional life by becoming a BBC music producer, which effectively knocked the progress of a very interesting creative Scots voice on the head. But what we are left with – and the 83-year-old is by no means finished – is a kernel of work that is both fascinating and very listenable.

The most astonishing factor in these premiere recordings, which team up Crawford's piano music spanning almost 50 years with his 2005 quintet for piano and strings, is the connection between the old and the new. Two major piano works – the Six Bagatelles of 1947 and the 1951 Sonata No2 – represent the earlier composer and a style rooted in the traditional modernism of the mid-20th century. Shades of Bartók inform the Sonata's arioso, performed with bold conviction by pianist Nicholas Ashton. The playful innocence of the Bagatelles reveals the composer's whimsical side.

In the Sonata Breve, written as a test piece for the 1991 Scottish International Piano Competition, the range of colour – from moody impressionist textures to virtuoso outbursts – is brilliantly captured in Ashton's multifaceted playing. And he injects A Saltire Sonata with an additional hint of nostalgia, reflecting the fact it the music was implanted in Crawford's mind many years before he committed it to paper.

All in all, the string of consciousness running through this selection is illuminating, completing its course in the 2005 quintet – an intertwining of modernism and romanticism played passionately by Ashton and the Edinburgh Quartet. There's enough evidence here to sell the notion that Crawford is a musical force to be reckoned with.