For many, by the early 1920s, Sir Charles Villiers Stanford was the grand old man of English music. For some, however, he was a relic of a Victorian past whose publication of two sets of 24 Preludes, 39 of which are recorded here, must have confirmed that very suspicion. With his ‘old-fashioned’ music, Stanford honours the mighty ‘48’ of his hero JS Bach, but with stylistic nods to Chopin and Saint-Saëns – in other words, the polar opposite of the lions of the day: men like Ravel and Bartók. Not that Stanford cared. Hard up in the aftermath of the Great War, he needed the kind of income that came from the keen amateur market, and many of these miniatures would have appealed to professionals and the less-skilled alike. But are they any good? Brisbane-born British pianist Sam Haywood thinks so, and I think so too. Had they been written 40 years earlier, they would almost certainly have been taken up more enthusiastically. Rather than travel linearly from No 1 to No 48, Haywood roams at will, finding connections and resonances that build a satisfyingly varied recital. He begins among the Flats and the Minors, launching his disc with Stanford’s…

Although Irish, we think of Stanford as a quintessential English composer, so to discover his close friendship with Brahms and hence the great violinist Joseph Joachim, is a little surprising. We know Stanford best by his fine music for the Anglican Church, less so by his orchestral music, and even less by his chamber music; evidenced in these two fine string quartets, beautifully played by the Dante Quartet. Both works are robustly Germanic and finely written; the surprise is that they are not better known. The Fifth Quartet opens confidently, full of good ideas and beautifully essayed, the musicians clearly loving every bar. Even though the other movements do not approach the first’s height of excellence, they provide perfect balance; the easy swing of the second movement offering a break from the terseness of the third. In the coda to the final movement Stanford includes a melody from Joachim’s Romance. That same Romance is included on the disc in tribute to their great friendship. Joachim was responsible for Brahms getting his First Symphony performed in England in 1877. In turn, Brahms arranged for Stanford’s music to be performed in Berlin in 1889. The Eighth Quartet from 1919 opens in nervous…

Given his fine achievements with the Finzi Singers, Paul Spicer is exactly the person to guide today’s burgeoning vocal talent into an appreciation of English choral music of the last 150 years. He does so here with excellent results in a generous program of 25 songs. Overshadowed by his successes in church music, Stanford’s partsongs show him alive to the myriad musical possibilities of text and a deep respect for the tradition of the Elizabethan madrigal. Many are settings of anonymous Elizabethan lyrics with the usual nymphs and shepherds, whilst others set the poetry of friends: Mary Coleridge and Alfred Lord Tennyson (Stanford memorialized Tennyson in 1892 with a heartfelt setting of the 57th canto from In Memoriam). Amongst highlights are the haunting and deservedly well known The Blue Bird (the solo exquisitely sung by Natalie Hyde), the imposing double-choir setting of Milton’s On Time, an evocative treatment of Mary Coleridge’s The train and the elegant When Mary thro’ the garden went. The Birmingham students sing with vibrant, crystalline tone and exemplary diction, always underlining the meaning of the texts. Occasionally there is some overindulgence, as in Out in the windy west, a paean to Queen Victoria, but the abiding…

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