This is one of those discs impossible to dislike but difficult to get over-excited about. Sarah-Jane Bradley, former member of the Sorrel Quartet, is a wonderfully eloquent player and obtains sterling support from her collaborators here. That said, the bill of fare is just a little samey. David Matthews’s Winter Remembered sets the elegiac tone with his customary expertise and it’s good news that he has a substantial premiere in this year’s Proms. (You’re in for a surprise if you only know the more internationalist music of brother Colin.) His sometimes radiant piece for viola and 16 strings was commissioned by the Deal and Presteigne Festivals for Sarah-Jane Bradley.

Its vaguely “Lyrita-school” ambience carries over into the real thing with Alwyn’s Pastoral Fantasia, a sub-VW reverie unheard for half a century after its unveiling – though there’s a rival account in the all-Alwyn miscellany on Chandos (10/92). John McCabe’s workmanlike score was reworked specially for the present, expert recording. And even the Holst Lyric Movement differs a little from the familiar version under Imogen Holst (Lyrita, 4/93) in that the solo cadenza just before the close has had a short passage in octaves restored. The Dutton programme concludes with Maconchy’s Romance of 1979, a quietly tough-minded construct, though not too tough to disturb the prevailing mood of quiet soulfulness.

“It is remarkable that the search for tranquillity, for rest, the dying away to silence or nothingness, may be felt in all the works on this disc. It may be that the viola’s timbre itself suggests a covert, private world of the imagination, into which at the end the composer’s mind withdraws.” So says Calum MacDonald’s helpful (tactful?) booklet-note. Recommended.