It was during his student days at the Royal Academy of Music that York Bowen (1884-1961) first struck up a bond with the great viola player Lionel Tertis (1876-1975). Theirs was a relationship that inspired an impressively idiomatic and superbly stylish body of music for the viola, including the two Melodies from 1917 and 1918, as well as three pieces that Bowen adapted for Tertis to play, namely the substantial Allegro de concert (1906) and Romance in A from 1908 (both originally for cello and piano) and the gifted 16-year-old’s fragrant Romance in D flat (for violin and piano). All feature here, though perhaps the standout item is the impassioned and sweeping Rhapsody in G minor. This meaty, highly virtuoso offering dates from 1955 and was fashioned for the viola player Maurice Loban. Yue Yu (a prizewinning graduate from the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and currently studying in Salzburg with Thomas Riebl) and Anthony Hewitt (founder and artistic director of the Ulverston International Music Festival) give splendid performances that hold their own even alongside those terrific displays by Lawrence Power and Simon Crawford-Phillips (Hyperion, 9/08).

The latter partnership’s stellar all-Bowen anthology includes both sonatas and the dazzling Phantasy in F from 1918, but not the pithy Three Duos for violin and viola, which likely date from the late 1940s and did not appear in print until 2017. Yu teams up with Jeffrey Armstrong for what is described on the inlay as the ‘first commercial audio recording’. Elsewhere on this very well-recorded survey Imogen Holst (1907-84) chips in with her charming Four Easy Pieces (1935) and the three-movement Duo for viola and piano that she crafted for Cecil Aronowitz and Nicola Grunberg (premiered at the 1968 Aldeburgh Festival). We also get Britten’s own transcription of the concluding Waltz from his giddily precocious Suite for violin and piano (1934-35) – a cheeky precursor, as annotator Paul Conway rightly suggests, to the ‘Wiener Walzer’ movement from the masterly Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge (1937). (I’d also cite the Piano Concerto’s slyly seductive second movement.) An excellent album, this, definitely worth investigating.