Francis Purcell Warren (‘Bunny’ to his friends) was a gifted viola player killed, when only 21, at the Battle of the Somme in July 1916. To Hubert Parry at the Royal College of Music he was ‘one of humanity’s tenderest possessions’, and his name lives on in the Elegy composed to his memory by Herbert Howells. This was heard at the Royal Albert Hall’s Mons Memorial Concert in December 1917 and then largely forgotten until recorded by Adrian Boult in 1973 (Lyrita, 1/76, 1/08). The poignant presence of a solo viola therefore needs no explanation and the backdrop of string quartet within a larger string orchestra pays natural homage to Vaughan Williams’s Tallis Fantasia. Howells himself said that ‘it is not in the least heroic: it was entirely dominated (in my mind) by the personality of my friend’, of whom he was once movingly reported to have said that ‘he was everything to me’. As an act of mourning this is essentially private grief expressed on a public canvas and yet it still feels as if we are eavesdropping on a very intimate and personal soliloquy. Philip Dukes is the eloquent soloist here, playing with a resonantly plangent tone and blending beautifully with his colleagues.

To my ears, however, the strings of the National Symphony Orchestra (as led by Paul Willey) are recorded too closely in Henry Wood Hall and this deprives their sound of richness and variety. After a while the effect becomes oppressive and lacks sufficient sense of light and shade to make the music breathe properly. The Russian violinist Rimma Sushanskaya is now a conductor but her direction here lacks a sense of stylistic poise: Finzi’s achingly expressed Romance treads restlessly and even Vaughan Williams’s Five Variants on ‘Dives and Lazarus’ plods along prosaically instead of taking us, with George Herbert, ‘to heavens doore’ as the best performances can. This was RVW’s quintessentially English offering for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, where it was conducted by Boult – not John Barbirolli, as claimed in the booklet. Dedicated listeners should seek out the Boult performances, where available, or those of Richard Hickox (which include the Lloyd Webber, too) or Neville Marriner’s classics with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields.