“They are quite difficult to listen to”: as introductory comments at a concert go, it’s not the most encouraging. But perhaps by describing Fauré’s and Schumann’s piano quintets to us that way, Schubert Ensemble violinist Simon Blendis was playing a bluff. Listening to these works played with this ensemble’s rich tone and unanimity – honed over 20 years with the same lineup – seemed no great effort.

Blendis was right in a way, though. The quintets we heard here, Fauré’s Piano Quintet No 1 and Schumann’s Quintet in E flat, are unwieldy, perhaps involving more instruments than are really necessary: the Schumann in particular can sound as though there is an elegant piano trio inside it, waiting patiently to get out. As for the Fauré, it might be called problematic if one was hung up on notions of what a well-made chamber work should be like. Here, the players negotiated skilfully its elusiveness and occasional bull-headedness, and its many passages of near overkill where all four string instruments play in unison.

One could have wished that cellist Jane Salmon indulged herself in soloistic, singing lines a bit more often, or that the ensemble as a whole had taken more opportunities to play truly quietly, but there were still plenty of highlights in both this and the Schumann. Many of them involved the impossibly sweet tone of second violinist Jan Schmolck, and the easy interplay between him and Blendis.

All this had been preceded by three of Schumann’s Canonic Studies for pedal piano, curiosities based on imitating patterns that have attracted instrumental arrangements from composers including Bizet and Debussy, and now David Matthews and Orlando Jopling. Study No 3, arranged by Matthews for piano quartet, sounded impenetrable thanks to its thick, chugging piano chords, although these dissolved in the light-as-air postlude. Jopling’s version of No 4 achieved a better balance, but it was Matthews’s reimagining of No 5 that worked best, with violin and viola following each other as if on tiptoe.