Stephen Hough’s three-concert residency at the Wigmore Hall this week is built around chamber works by Brahms. Its centrepiece was a programme of two piano quintets, in which Hough was partnered by the Castalian Quartet. Half of the concert was devoted to what is perhaps the best known of all piano quintets, Brahms’s work in F minor, Op 34. It was paired with a genuine rarity – Carl Frühling’s Quintet in F sharp minor.

Today, Frühling only finds mention in the most comprehensive of musical reference books. Born in 1868, he worked in Vienna as an accompanist as well as a composer. Many of his works were lost after his death in 1937 and are still being rediscovered. As revealed by his 1894 piano quintet – with its sly harmonic shifts, tipsy scherzo and a finale that makes two attempts to launch a fugue – he was a composer of real fluency and imagination, though he never strayed far from Brahmsian romanticism, despite sharing a composition teacher with Mahler, Zemlinsky and Janáček.

The piano writing in Frühling’s quintet seems more ornate than in the Brahms, but in both works it would have been too easy for the piano to dominate the strings. Yet there was never a suggestion of that here. Hough is far too refined and fastidious a player to countenance that, and the Franco-British Castalian Quartet (who won the Royal Philharmonic Society’s young artists award last year), seem a feisty group, with a real personality and strong interpretative ideas. Ensemble and balance were always spot-on.

• Available to stream on the Wigmore Hall website. The final concert in Stephen Hough’s residency at Wigmore Hall, London, is on 11 January.