It is particularly gratifying to see that the rich repertoire of 19th- and early-20th-century British cello music, like its considerable counterpart for the violin, is at last being acknowledged and, in performances of this excellence, insight and clarity, the works on this recording surely deserve to be aired more frequently. Parry’s lyrical effusion of 1880 (rev 1883), which he wrote for Jules Lasserre, is a powerful work and evinces a distinctive English accent in its melodic richness and diatonic muscularity which gainsays the all too frequent accusations of slavish deference to Brahms. Both Paul and Huw Watkins establish, from the outset, a firm grip on the potential difficulties of the Delius Sonata. Here every nuance seems to tell and, because of the splendid shaping of each phrase and grading of each nuance, the ebb and flow of the work and the piano’s procession of colourful harmonies have an inevitable coherence.

Although Foulds produced a good deal of cello music during his career as a professional cellist, the most substantial was his Sonata, Op 6, of 1905 (though it survives nowadays in its 1927 revision), an emotionally charged work on the same scale as the Parry. Structurally unconventional, it is full of engaging thematic material, above all in the generous Lento. While some of the motivic ideas of Foulds’s work were based on two old English Puritan tunes, the allusion of Bantock’s exotic Hamabdil was to Jewish music. Evoking the hymn traditionally sung after Havadlah, the blessing said at the conclusion of the Sabbath, it is played here with appropriate pathos and solemnity.