Here's probably the most appealing and varied instalment in Richard Hickox's Frank Bridge series for Chandos. The disc's highlight is a superb performance of the 1930 'Concerto elegiaco' Oration, in which Hickox teams up with the gifted German cellist Alban Gerhardt. High drama and emotional candour are the keynotes to a riveting display. But there's no want of intimacy or compassion in the more contemplative passages, and the result is a trenchant interpretation that does justice to one of the towering masterpieces of British music.
The 1940 Rebus overture is as invigorating and impeccably crafted a concert-opener as any British composer has yet produced. The touching Lament (1915) is sensitively done, but Hickox and company seem less comfortable in Anthony Pople's completion of the patiently argued opening Allegro moderato from a projected symphony for strings upon which Bridge was working at the time of his death in 1941. Fortunately, there's a glowing account of A Prayer, Bridge's only composition for chorus and orchestra, a moving and often hauntingly beautiful setting from 1916-18 of words from The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis. Minor strictures notwithstanding, this is an essential purchase for Oration alone – and the music itself deserves the widest dissemination.