A late developer, Vaughan Williams took many years to ‘find’ his voice, and this, it could fairly be said, emerged with the Tallis Fantasia and The Lark Ascending before the First World War, after he had finally assimilated the influences of Parry, Elgar and Wagner. This early Fantasy for piano and orchestra (edited by Graham Parlett), written in a one-movement form, uncannily anticipates the series of Cobbett ‘phantasy’ works yet to be composed. Begun in October 1896, though not finished until 1902 (and even later revised), it offers an interesting insight into that lengthy period of gestation the composer experienced from his student years in the mid-1890s and his maturity at almost 40. A work of late-Romanticism at heart, at times unwieldy and stylistically inchoate (like Delius’s unsuccessful concerto), it nevertheless provides fascinating glimpses into a future world with its spacious diatonic melodies, and a precedent for that unlikely combination of Wagner, Delius and folksong in In the Fen Country of 1904.

The two Mathias piano concertos, performed here with great sensivity by Bebbington, also provide an important commentary on the Welsh composer’s early development and maturity between 1955 and 1961. The First Concerto (edited by his daughter and Geraint Lewis) was written when Mathias was only 20 and reveals a fascinatingly wiry, acerbic mindset which the composer largely jettisoned in his later style. With a greater sense of direction, the four-movement Second Concerto is at once more characteristic of Mathias’s individual chemistry of lyricism, mysticism, neo-romanticism and neo-classicism. Full of imaginative, well-contrasted ideas and rich orchestration, it is a work that rivals the stunning Harp Concerto, Op 50, of 1970.