Sarah Connolly sings Bridge's orchestral songs beautifully

No fewer than 10 first recordings adorn this, the last instalment in Hickox's valuable Bridge series. Philip Langridge is in ardent voice for the first five tracks, the fourth of which, Love wenta-riding, remains the composer's best-known song. It sounds exhilaratingly new-minted in its sumptuous orchestral garb and is framed here by two companion settings of words by Mary Coleridge, Where she lies asleep and Thy hand in mine.
Particularly striking is the big-scale treatment afforded to Rupert Brooke's Blow out, you bugles, written in 1918 for the tenor Gervase Elwes and whose incorporation of the Last Post movingly anticipates Bridge's own towering Oration for cello and orchestra of a dozen years later.
Sarah Connolly is wonderfully eloquent in the haunting and often inspired 1922-24 Tagore diptych for mezzo and orchestra and also excels in the very early Berceuse (a remarkably assured setting of Dorothy Wordsworth from 1901) and affecting Mantle of blue (1918, and orchestrated 16 years later, to words by the Irish poet Padraic Colum). The programme concludes with five purely instrumental items, the most extended of which is the 1911 suite for wind band, The Pageantof London. Expertly fashioned, it makes for a diverting enough quarter of an hour (the 'Pavane' in the middle movement was destined to reappear 15 years later in Warlock's Capriol Suite). The tuneful Serenade exudes plenty of sepia-tinted charm, as does the wistful little Berceuse (1901).
Throw in some spick and span orchestral playing from the BBC NOW and Chandos's commendably natural engineering, not to mention Paul Hindmarsh's scholarly notes, and you have a job well done.