The release of this four-CD set of works for solo string instruments and orchestra pays tribute, as does the recently issued box-set of ‘British Piano Concertos’, to the imagination and vision of the late Richard Itter and his pioneering Lyrita label. For many, Lyrita was the British music label and was loyally supported by various ‘in house’ conductors, among them Adrian Boult, Nicholas Braithwaite, Norman Del Mar and Vernon Handley. Many of the recordings offered here are from the old Lyrita analogue and early digital catalogue but there are a few recordings made during the label’s short revival between 1993 and 1996 which were not issued until more than a decade after they were made.

The set makes for fantastic value for money, each CD containing well over 70 minutes of music, and the performances are generally of tremendous vibrancy and quality. Lorraine McAslan’s reading of Coleridge-Taylor’s 1912 Violin Concerto is surely the best recording we have of this much-neglected work and the two Holst works – the Double Concerto for two violins with Emmanuel Hurwitz and Kenneth Sillito and the brooding Lyric Movement for viola and orchestra with Cecil Aronowitz – with their immediacy by no means betray the fact that they were recorded over 40 years ago. The rarely played Cello Concerto by William Busch is a tender gem in the hands of Raphael Wallfisch and I have a particular fondness for the first modern recording of Moeran’s achingly lyrical Violin Concerto with John Georgiadis. The set is generously laden with concertos written after the Second World War, including Roberto Gerhard’s Violin Concerto, Peter Racine Fricker’s passionate Violin Concerto of 1950 (a work well worth rediscovering), Elizabeth Maconchy’s numinous Serenata concertante and three works from the later 1960s: David Morgan’s Violin Concerto of 1966, Don Banks’s Violin Concerto of 1968 and the Nocturnes and Cadenzas for cello and orchestra by Alun Hoddinott, written and recorded the same year (1969), all of which attest to Itter’s catholic and exploratory outlook and, more importantly, to his considerable legacy.