This repertoire calls for the warmth and resonance that are hallmarks of the ‘Chandos sound’, and St Augustine’s Kilburn serves very well for the imagined space of Gloucester Cathedral which the Tallis Fantasia not only fills but embodies in its formal architecture. From an acoustic vantage point set a good way back and a little higher, the psalm-like articulation of ‘Why fum’th in fight’ is beautifully clear, before the full hymn texture (from 3'00") is illuminated from within by arpeggiated harmonies lost or obscured on most recordings.

Better still, whether heard in Spatial Audio or simply on a decent system, Vaughan Williams’s dialogue with the past (from 4'14") is vividly staged by the appreciable distance between ensembles, and to a degree matched on record only by Constantin Silvestri’s masterful handling of the acoustic in Winchester Cathedral (Warner, 5/68). Without stretching to Silvestri’s heavenly lengths, Wilson wisely takes the composer’s metronome mark with a generous pinch of salt, while easing back and forth in the central section with a feeling for the ground beneath his feet like Lewis Hamilton in his McLaren.

The pre-eminent point of comparison for many listeners will be Barbirolli’s 1963 album of ‘English String Music’ (Warner, 5/63), and the players of the modern Sinfonia of London yield nothing to their predecessors in the bite and impassioned surge of their address to Elgar’s Introduction. Set beside the new version, Barbirolli’s approach to the Allegro’s fugue is cautious, even whiskery, relying for its effect more on trenchancy than the rush of blood to the head (and heart) that Wilson gives us without either compromising on accuracy or neglecting to nudge and caress the recitative treatment of the Introduction material (from 2'45").

Perhaps Wilson presses a little hard on Late Swallows, though the rustling textures of the withdrawn central section evoke Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht where even Norman Del Mar in Bournemouth (6/77, reissued on Chandos) allows the music to drift into somnolence. No less intriguingly, Wilson underlines how the first movement of Howells’s Concerto strikingly foreshadows the modal-pentatonic melodies, astringent harmonies and earthy rhythms of Tippett’s Concerto for Double String Orchestra. He is much stronger than Boult (the Concerto’s dedicatee – 12/74 – and another Classic Reconsidered, 8/21) at drawing out the gestural contrasts between taut prevailing counterpoint and a much freer kind of instrumental recitative.

The central elegy bears the same harmonic imprint of elegy for Howells’s son Michael as the Requiem and Hymnus Paradisi, though there is also (unlike in the Tippett) a hint of the angst particular to the slow movement of Walton’s First Symphony, premiered in 1934. Wilson and his band make a persuasive case for the piece as an English counterpart to Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta: I expect it has been said before, but the Sinfonia of London belongs in the Formula 1 class of orchestras, and in this repertoire sits in pole position.