Here’s over two and a half hours of absorbing listening, showcasing 29 British-born or based cellists in performances spanning more than seven decades – and what a remarkable, heartwarming tradition they embody!

Among the earliest practitioners here, it was Felix Salmond who gave the ill-fated 1919 première of Elgar’s Cello Concerto, a work of which Beatrice Harrison, William Henry Squire and the 13-year-old Reginald Kilbey were also pioneering exponents. Salmond and Harrison give bewitchingly idiomatic accounts of Grieg’s To Spring and Delius’s Elegy respectively, while one of Squire’s finest pupils, Cedric Sharpe, cuts a dash in Popper’s Polonaise de Concert (where portamento is more subtly applied than on his mentor’s version of Godard’s Berceuse de Jocelyn with Sir Hamilton Harty at the piano). Sir John Barbirolli initially made his name as an orchestral cellist and is heard performing Bach with pianist Ethel Bartlett in a recording made in July 1929 for the National Gramophone Society.

Two pedagogues in particular are rightly given their due. Disc One opens with the famous solo from Rossini’s William Tell Overture played by Douglas Cameron, a professor at the Royal Academy of Music, where his pupils numbered Douglas Cummings, Keith Harvey, Thomas Igloi, Christopher van Kampen and Derek Simpson (who in turn taught at the same institution for nearly 40 years). A founder member of the Allegri Quartet, William Pleeth was ‘cello daddy’ to Jacqueline du Pré. Both are heard in music by Rubbra. Pleeth teams up with his good friend the composer in the central Vivace flessible from the 1946 Sonata (of which he was the joint dedicatee), while du Pré lends powerful advocacy to the 1943-44 Soliloquy in a recently unearthed recording from 1965 with the (on this occasion, augmented) Newbury String Players under her brother-in-law, Christopher Finzi.

Other notable Pleeth pupils here include Robert Cohen, Colin Carr, Tim Hugh, Paul Watkins and Alan Dalziel (who gives an exceptionally eloquent rendering of Fauré’s Élégie with John Constable). Also happily represented are a handful of relatively unsung orchestral principals – Anthony Pini, Laurie Kennedy (grandfather to Nigel), Norman Jones, Denis Vigay – though I was especially smitten by Raymond Clark’s rapt contribution to the ‘Scène d’Aurore et de Désiré’ from Act 2 of Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty (with the Royal Opera House Orchestra directed by Constant Lambert).

Michael Jameson’s extensive, painstakingly researched annotation leaves nothing to be desired and the transfers are first class. Cello fans should seek out this generous anthology without further ado.