As Lewis Foreman explains in his very informative notes, this disc is effectively a tribute to the work and vision of the viola player Lionel Tertis, who commissioned all three works featured here. It is good to hear McEwen’s Viola Concerto of 1901 given a performance of such conviction. A pioneering work that predates the substantial British Romantic chamber works for viola by Bowen and Dale, the Concerto gave Tertis the opportunity to project his instrument across a large-scale, ambitious three-movement structure, its rhetoric common to many late‑19th-century concertos, yet the register and tone of the viola generate a different sound world in which McEwen’s rich orchestration gently yet sumptuously supports the solo instrument. Lawrence Power’s playing is wonderfully varied, at times delicate and poetical, at others broad, passionate and generous.

This is especially so in the case of the two works by Vaughan Williams. Though I admit to a special fondness for Willcocks’s 1964 recording of Flos campi, with the radiant, numinous sound of King’s College Choir, Power’s intonation, tone and interpretative insight have the edge over that of Cecil Aronowitz, especially in the lyrically expansive paragraphs. But Power (and Brabbins, who exercises his usual imaginative flair and masterly orchestral control in this repertoire) is at his best in the Suite of 1934. Here the very sound of the viola seems to articulate that quintessential voice of the composer: the generous paraphrase of Bach in the Prelude, the simple melody of the ‘Carol’, the heavenly aura of the ‘Ballad’, the mercurial élan of the ‘Moto perpetuo’ and the deeply innocent ‘Musette’. This is a ‘must have’ for all lovers of Vaughan Williams and British music in general!