This second helping from Chandos of music by Anglo-Australian composers Edgar Bainton (1880-1956) and Hubert Clifford (1904-59), boasts performances and recording quality that are fully the equal of its predecessor under Vernon Handley (12/99). This time, it’s Martyn Brabbins who secures a splendidly secure and committed response from the BBC Philharmonic, and the disc as a whole certainly merits the investigation of any reader who enjoys venturing off the beaten track.

The two works by Bainton confirm the positive impression left on me by those laudable pioneering accounts under Handley and Douglas Bostock respectively of the Second Symphony (mentioned above) and ‘symphonic movement’ Genesis (Classico, 10/02). Completed in the spring of 1929 and first heard that September at the Three Choirs Festival in Worcester, Epithalamion is an intoxicating scherzo for orchestra, its lyrical and harmonic scope reminiscent of Howells. An English Idyll dates from 1945, some 11 years after Bainton had emigrated to Australia to take up the directorship of the New South Wales State Conservatory in Sydney. Performed only once since its June 1946 première, this is a glowing setting of three unashamedly homesick poems by fellow Englishman Sir Neville Cardus (The Manchester Guardian critic who spent the war years writing about cricket and music for The Sydney Morning Herald); Paul Whelan sings them beautifully.

The rest of the disc is given over to Clifford, who left his native Victoria in 1930 to study under Vaughan Williams at the Royal College of Music. Winner of the Cobbett Prize in a competition for a suite for use by school orchestras, A Kentish Suite was composed during the summer of 1935 and takes inspiration from locations along the route of Charles II’s journey from Dover to London on his return from exile in 1660. It’s a charming confection, melodious, evocative and witty, well crafted and culminating in a sunny pageant that nods towards Walton in ceremonial mood.

Scarcely less endearing are the Five English Nursery Tunes, written in London during the wartime bombing (by which time Clifford had attained the post of BBC Empire Director of Music). After the war, Clifford worked with Sir Alexander Korda at London Films, commissioning the scores for (among others) The Winslow Boy, The Fallen Idol and The Third Man. In addition to Anton Karas’s memorable zither contribution on the last-named project, the uncredited Clifford had to pen some background music for a nightclub scene. The result was The Casanova Melody, published under the pseudonym of Michael Sarsfield and presented here in a sumptuous new orchestration by Rodney Newton. The winsome Shanagolden (‘An Irish Pastoral Sketch’) dates from 1953, the year that Clifford returned to the BBC as Head of Light Music Programmes.

This attractive programme is masterminded and comprehensively annotated by Lewis Foreman. Now, would some enterprising company please give us Bainton’s gorgeous Concerto-Fantasia for piano and orchestra?