If one were asked to sum up young British cellist Laura van der Heijden’s career to date, then beyond its consistent story of intelligently musical and technically superb playing, and its top-drawer collaborations, it would be the fact that her mantra appears to have always been, ‘Wait, then do it well’. And here now is the crowning example of that approach: finally her first concerto recording, a full 12 years after winning BBC Young Musician aged 15, six years after her debut recital on Champs Hill (2/18), and two solo recitals into her clearly-now-home relationship with Chandos. It should thus surprise no one that this programme of British music for cello and orchestra is very classy indeed.

Frank Bridge’s Oration or Concerto elegiaco (1930) was conceived jointly as an outcry against the inhumanity of war and as a tribute to the victims of the First World War, with the cellist cast in the role of lamenter. Van der Heijden is mesmerising, her intense, focused tone powerfully articulating its pained rhetoric, her keening lyricism punctuated with grittier, muscular anger. Meanwhile Wigglesworth and the BBC Scottish SO are under its skin right from its darkly whispered opening measures; you could cut the air with a knife even before van der Heijden’s own darkly, tensely smoulderingly, supply lyrical entrance, and their later martial Allegro giusto is a showstopper.

Cheryl Frances-Hoad’s Earth, Sea, Air was written for van der Heijden, and she premiered it with Wigglesworth and the BBC SSO in Glasgow in 2023, just the week before they took it into the studio. As with the Bridge, its three conjoined movements see the cellist assume a dramatic role, this time anthropomorphic, its lines depicting the flight of a swift as it dips and soars around the globe over natural phenomena, the latter depicted by an at times wide and thundering, and at times luminously dreamlike orchestra. It’s a mighty, majestic, gripping work; full of theatre, colour and inventive textures and rhythmic writing, opening with a sharply ferocious volcanic punch that feels rather like nature’s postscript to the preceding Bridge; and as it proceeds, a brilliant vehicle for van der Heijden’s ability to sing, declaim and glitter. It’s also a score that demands, and here gets, a hand-in-glove relationship with the orchestra, which itself is very much the cellist’s equal partner. The impression is of a major new addition to the canon, destined to take up permanent roost, and it couldn’t have hoped for more accomplished champions to set it out on its journey.

Walton’s Cello Concerto (1957) was the work with which van der Heijden won BBC Young Musician, and what a stamping on record this tautly structured reading now is, van der Heijden as expressive through its virtuosic brilliance – I love her smartly puckish flicks between pizzicato and arco at the close of the Scherzo – as in its moments of expansive lyricism. Proof, if any were ever needed, that the best things come to those who wait.