A Wykehamist friend, who lived in Norfolk, once drolly opined that every British composer born in the final decades of the 19th century invariably composed something called “Idyll for Strings.” True enough: all those depictions of torpid, hazy late-Victorian/Edwardian summer afternoons. I’ll admit I was expecting this CD to contain little else. Not really. Much of this music is quietly trenchant, even defiant, in a civilised way, as well as being beautifully crafted and containing a fulfilling combination of radiant Romanticism and modernity.

The magnum opus is Ireland’s First Sonata (the otherwise excellent sleeve note curiously refers to his Second, which I’ve never heard performed as the “more familiar”). I loved its Brahmsian touches with their uniquely English twists and its solid arguments. It richly deserves to be better known. Similarly, the unfinished Frank Bridge and Arthur Bliss works. The Bliss, dedicated to Lady Elgar, is more substantial and complex and conveys, among other things, the burden of grief the composer experienced to the end of his life over the death of his brother, Kennard, in the First World War, a war in which the composer himself was a combatant and obviously survived. I jolly well wish they had completed...