Two first recordings frame the third volume in Richard Hickox’s Frank Bridge series: the darkly opulent Coronation March of 1911 swaggers with a glinting defiance – and what a treat to encounter the inventive and witty Sir Roger de Coverley in its alternative guise for full orchestra (the October 1922 première under Henry Wood was a great success). The Vignettes de danse of 1938 stem from a suite for piano that Bridge had sketched 13 years previously after a holiday in the Mediterranean. Immaculately scored for small orchestra, they form a sophisticated 11-minute triptych, whose centrepiece (‘Zoraida’) evinces a sinuous exoticism not far removed from Holst’s Beni Mora or Ibert’s Escales.

In Hickox’s flexible hands, Summer strikes a perceptive balance between idyllic languor and piercing heartache. It’s followed by a long-overdue return to circulation for Phantasm. Completed in 1931, this imposing rhapsody for piano and orchestra inhabits an apprehensive, dream-like world. Howard Shelley is his customarily unruffled self, and Hickox plots a clear-sighted course, though Kathryn Stott and Vernon Handley (Conifer, 1/90 – nla) seem to find more mystery and poetry.

The shadows lengthen further still for There is a willow grows aslant a brook, a poignant, twilit evocation which Hickox drags out to 11'18"; Nicholas Cleobury (Conifer, 9/98 – nla) takes 9'12" and Norman Del Mar 9'19", both without any loss of mournful intensity. It’s the only miscalculation in an otherwise compelling, finely played programme. Once again, Paul Hindmarsh’s authoritative booklet-essay is a boon, as is Chandos’s characteristically ripe sound.