Premiered in Norfolk, Connecticut, in 1915 by the pianist Harold Bauer, Stanford’s Piano Concerto No 2, actually composed in 1911, is a work in the grand tradition. The composer should have been in the USA to conduct the work himself as part of a tour of America’s eastern seaboard but the sinking in May 1915 of the Lusitania, on which Stanford had booked his passage, put paid to all his well-laid plans and he had to wait until December 1916 to hear (and conduct) it for the first time in Bournemouth. Stanford may well have derived the epic nature of his work from Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2, of which he had given the first English performance with Rachmaninov at Leeds in 1910; yet, for all that, Stanford’s lyrical gifts in the second subjects of the first and last movements, and the poetic opening melody of the slow movement, have an affecting individuality which we have been slow to acknowledge in our zeal to compare him, somewhat crudely, with Brahms and other contemporaries.

Benjamin Frith, clearly a fervent advocate of Stanford’s chamber music, brings out the abundant invention of the concerto in the clarity and nuance of his touch and phrasing. In particular, the visionary and intimate chamber idiom of the first movement’s development, introspective in mood, is especially moving and beautifully shaped. This same sensitivity is brought by Frith to the little-known three Dante Rhapsodies, Op 92, which Stanford wrote for Percy Grainger in 1904 – unjustly neglected tone-poems for solo piano, full of emotional insight and craftsmanly legerdemain. This is a fine recording in generous sound, with sympathetic orchestral playing from the BBC NOW and its conductor Andrew Gourlay. Might Frith perhaps now tackle the much lighter but equally delightful Piano Concerto No 1?