Bridge's Suite dates from 1910, the same year as Vaughan Williams's Tallis Fantasia, but has never become as popular. As Kenneth Loveland rightly says in his notes with this recording, Bridge's ''mastery of string tone and performing practicalities shows in every page of this work''. He goes on to praise the glowing harmonies and the contrapuntal pattern, but what is missing is the melodic inspiration that we find in Bridge's suite The Sea, written at about the same time. The ''Nocturne'' is certainly a very beautiful movement, a long meditation, skilfully wrought, but still—to my ears—lacking some inner compulsion. No blame attributable to a deeply felt, well executed performance by the English String Orchestra under William Boughton recorded in the resonant acoustic of Birmingham University's Great Hall—over-resonant for some tastes, I fancy.
Parry's Lady Radnor's Suite, a favourite with Sir Adrian Boult, is a charming piece of time-travelling that doesn't sound like pastiche. The movements have the titles familiar from Bach suites—Allemande, Bourree, Gigue, etc.—and all are delightfully graceful in style. The Parry revival grows apace and it is pleasant to hear him in relaxed mood, though never over-stepping the bounds of good taste.
I do not know another piece of music that seems so saturated with the tragedy of the First World War as Butterworth's A Shropshire Lad rhapsody. I suppose, knowing that he was killed in action, the listener is programmed to supply the appropriate emotional reaction, but I venture to think anyone coming to it fresh, with no background knowledge, would sense its pathos. If ever a man composed his own requiem, Butterworth did in this poignant and beautiful work. The other pieces are based on folk-songs, but it is the rhapsody that convinces us we lost a potentially great composer. The performances are good, the recording unexceptionable.'