The first thing worth mentioning about this remarkable recording is the sound, an Andrew Keener production with engineer Dave Rowell where, for the Elgar Concerto, the mighty tuttis are drawn into the foreground without leaving the viola stranded as a shrinking violet. In principle Lionel Tertis’s transcription shouldn’t really work; unlike, say, Bartók’s ascetic masterpiece, and in spite of its underlying sense of sadness, the Elgar is a fully fledged heroic concerto where, beyond the opening recitative (rendered somewhat motherly on the smaller instrument), the orchestra rises to a very considerable height. Timothy Ridout is a strong, personable player whose deft handling of the Scherzo and heartfelt playing of the Adagio make the concerto’s central episodes exceptionally memorable. He also elevates the opening recitative to a level of defiance that most cello-led alternatives can’t quite manage. All this would be impossible without Martyn Brabbins’s achingly beautiful BBC SO accompaniment (witness the murmured return of the opening theme at 6'32"). One word of warning, though, which is nothing to do with either the recording or the performance. Rendering Elgar’s Cello Concerto suitable for the viola involves a number of octave jumps that if you’re not familiar with Tertis’s arrangement might seem disconcerting, initially at least. My advice is to be patient. You’ll soon get used to them.

The contemporaneous Bloch coupling recalls another Elgar/Bloch ‘classic’ where Pierre Fournier performed the Elgar Concerto and Bloch’s Schelomo on a well-regarded DG LP (9/67). The Suite’s most famous early recordings featured the viola-and-piano version, the wonderful viola player William Primrose, with pianists Fritz Kitzinger in 1938 (RCA/HMV, 1/42) and David Stimer in 1956 (Capitol, now available as a download from Naxos). But turn to the orchestral version as performed here by Ridout and Brabbins and the music gains a whole new dimension, most strikingly the work’s fraught opening measures, which as orchestrated bear an uncanny resemblance to the parallel bars in ‘Peripetie’, the fourth of Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra, written 10 years earlier. Then again, Bloch could as easily prophesy the future, as in the suite’s finale with its popping woodblocks, racy syncopations and sudden burst of sunlight, which give a nod towards the young Prokofiev (the Second Symphony’s long finale comes most readily to mind). The third-movement Lento is charged with a sense of mystery especially as realised by these remarkably intuitive performers.

As Bloch recordings go (sadly there are still too few of them on the market), this is without question one of the finest. The music is quite simply glorious, more than a match for the Elgar Concerto.