The music of the English composer Ruth Gipps (1921-1999) is undergoing a resurgence, a sign of an overdue interest in female composers. A protégée of Ralph Vaughan Williams, she was admired as a student but struggled to have her work accepted in broader musical circles. Also a pianist, oboist and conductor, she founded the Chanticleer Orchestra to perform works by neglected contemporary composers. Recent recordings of two of her five symphonies and her G minor Piano Concerto have introduced her music to a new audience.

These examples of Gipps’s chamber works all involve the clarinet. (Her husband Robert Baker was a clarinettist.) The Rhapsody, Quintet, and award-winning 1956 Clarinet Sonata display a taut, no-nonsense approach to form, modal harmonies showing a clear Vaughan Williams influence, smart counterpoint, and attractive, pastoral melodic invention. Two short pieces, The Kelpie of Corrievreckan, and Prelude for Bass Clarinet, complete the program.

The music tends to bubble along without much dynamic contrast, although in the Rhapsody a fugal passage stands out, launched by the cello. In its textural rigor, Gibbs’s music resembles that of Arthur Bliss (whose Cello...