Dancing naked in public is an act that leaves you with no place to hide. This was Peter Maxwell Davies’s description of the dangers of writing chamber music, uttered before the premiere of his newest essay in the nude, a Piano Quartet, played in the Pittville Pump Room, by its commissioning musicians, the Primrose Piano Quartet.

In fact, Maxwell Davies has been dancing this way so often recently that I suspect the real dangers are minimal. Technically, nothing in this 20-minute memorial to the artist and photographer Gunnie Moberg, an Orkney friend, takes you by surprise. Through brief, interlinked character pieces, instruments creep, chew or scud through knotty remnants of some secret theme. One section is rigorously solemn, another erupts with rhetorical gestures. A Faroe Island tune is hinted at; but the puzzle’s key proves to be, as so often with Davies, plainsong, with the melody cradled in tonality’s arms before the piece fades into sadness and a question mark.

Old tricks, then; but the feelings generated stay fresh. When tonal harmony arrives the effect is overwhelming: in a perplexing world we’ve finally reached home comforts, if only briefly. Slightly wayward elsewhere in their recital, the Primrose musicians put their best fingers forward in this passionate, urgent performance.

If Davies was dancing naked, heaven knows how to describe Danjulo Ishizaka, who launched his shared Pump Room recital with Bach’s second unaccompanied cello suite. What had he eaten for breakfast – iron bars? It seemed so from his muscular, utterly confident playing. This was a young man’s Bach: short of emotional depth, but ferociously engaged. Ishizaka’s more romantic side shot out later in Schubert’s arpeggione sonata and (screwed to fever pitch) Grieg’s cello sonata.

Placed alongside this German-Japanese wonder, the Israeli pianist Shai Wosner was doomed to appear polished but reticent, shrouding his own showcase, Janácek’s suite In the Mists, in one mist too many. Atmospheric, yes; but I couldn’t find the work’s teeth.

Both these musicians have been recruited to BBC Radio 3’s valuable New Generation Artists scheme, though for Cheltenham, like all venerable music festivals, a New Generation Audiences scheme might be even more valuable. Still, us middle-aged had a rousing time at La Serenissima’s Handel and Vivaldi banquet with the vibrant mezzo Sarah Connolly. We tapped the feet too at the Pump Room concert by Calefax – five extremely gifted Dutch gents who almost made the wind quintet seem the best musical format on the planet.

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