Each time I hear Bridge’s Dance Rhapsody (1908) I wonder how such a rapturously tuneful work can be so shamefully neglected. Indeed, the more I listen, the more I’m convinced it deserves to be as popular as, say, Ravel’s La valse! Nicholas Braithwaite’s interpretation, recorded nearly three decades ago, is neither as brilliant nor as vividly recorded as Richard Hickox’s more recent version (Chandos, 1/03) but Braithwaite makes his own, important points. I relish the intense songfulness of the strings’ inner voices (beginning around 10'42"), for example, and the general fervour of the London Philharmonic’s playing is thrilling throughout. In the more elusive (yet still alluring) Dance Poem (1913), Braithwaite unflinchingly explores the music’s darker corners, finding a tragic vein that Hickox misses, though the newer account moves with admirable grace.

Braithwaite is magically sensitive, too, in the vaguely Delian world of the Two Poems (1916); “The Open Air” sustains a fragile atmosphere of mystery and “The Story of my Heart” is simultaneously passionate and mercurial. The extreme contrasts of character contained in the Rebus overture (1940) are crisply delineated – and note how the LPO revel in the passages of glittering, Straussian opulence. As for the Allegro moderato (a loose-limbed movement that Bridge left unfinished at his death in 1941), Hickox’s taut, focused reading (Chandos, 6/04) provides a semblance of symphonic cohesion, while Braithwaite elicits the stronger emotional charge. I could not imagine being without either recording.