Caught at the junction of folk-earthiness and blue remembered sentiment, Ivor Gurney’s music has dated more markedly than that of his English contemporaries Howells, Finzi and Rubbra. Perhaps it’s the unapologetic emotional intensity and poetic preferences that tend towards the purple that keeps his music out of fashion. Whatever the reason, it’s a loss. A generous melodist, watercolour-delicate with harmony, Gurney’s miniatures paint a poignant landscape of their time – geographical and psychological.

But neglected though he is, Gurney isn’t entirely absent from the catalogue. So it came as a surprise to find that this new release on EM Records is promoted as the ‘world premiere recording of Gurney’s song-cycle The Western Playland’. Recordings from Graham Trew, Roger Vignoles and the Coull Quartet (Meridian, 11/90) and the superb account from Stephen Varcoe, Iain Burnside and the Delmé Quartet (Hyperion, 9/90) beg to differ. Closer inspection reveals that it is the edition alone – Philip Lancaster’s 2013 version corrects various ‘errors’ in the 1924 published score – that is new.

Fortunately this latest recording by Roderick Williams, pianist Michael Dussek and the Bridge Quartet is persuasive enough not to need exclusivity. From the urgent opening exhortation of ‘Reveille’ to the sardonic bitterness of ‘Is my team ploughing?’ (none of the wistful gentleness of Butterworth’s setting) and the close-cradled intimacy of ‘Golden friends’, Williams catches all the work’s open-hearted directness, dispatching any risk of kitsch with the beauty of his phrasing, the flexibility of his tone. A handful of Howells’s songs – the lovely ‘King David’ and ‘Girl’s Song’ – are a bonus.

Dussek spars and supports gamely but the Bridge Quartet lack Williams’s conviction, often tentative, failing to drive phrases forwards. It’s a problem all the more exposed in the premiere recording (unqualified, this time) of Gurney’s mercurial String Quartet in D minor. Blotted with intonation issues and scrappy ensemble, it meanders where it should chivvy along, losing the architecture of the extended first movement and never quite recovering.