John Wilson has built a quiet project out of these Sinfonia of London string albums: rehabilitate the byways of British music without pretending they equal the highway. The third instalment holds to that discipline. Ireland's Concertino Pastorale, Walton's late string sonata, and Goossens' By the Tarn are the byways; Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings is the destination. Ireland wrote the Concertino Pastorale in 1939, with Britain days away from war, and that context is audible. Wilson doesn't sentimentalise it — he finds the brooding underside of the Eclogue and the genuine grief of the Threnody before the Toccata's brief release. The Sinfonia's strings glow in Chandos's spacious acoustic, and that warmth pays particular dividends in Goossens' By the Tarn, a nature poem that could easily tip into mood music but here has actual weight. Walton's 1971 Sonata for String Orchestra is a late-career curiosity: honeyed and vinegary by turns, its central Lento genuinely affecting, its Presto polished to a high shine. The syncopated finale is the kind of writing that rewards the ensemble that can actually play it, and this one can. Wilson treats the counterpoint as a structural argument, not decoration. The Britten is the centrepiece and earns that billing. Laurence Kilsby has a light, supple tenor that the review usefully compares to the young Peter Pears — the comparison holds because both voices float rather than push, which is exactly what the Pastoral and the Keats Sonnet require. He brings real brilliance to the Tennyson Nocturne and the Jonson Hymn without forcing. Christopher Parkes is a sure-footed and sonorous horn partner. One reservation: horn and orchestra slightly overpower the voice at the climax of the Lyke-Wake Dirge. This is the most terrifying moment in the cycle — the one where the text's medieval dread should land without cushioning — and the balance tips fractionally wrong. It doesn't undermine the performance; it limits its ceiling. Kilsby's account is otherwise seriously impressive, subtly inflected, and marks him as a tenor worth tracking. What Wilson is doing across these albums is less curatorial than argumentative: he's insisting that mid-century British string writing is a coherent tradition, not a footnote to Elgar. Ireland, Walton, and Goossens aren't at Britten's level — Wilson doesn't pretend they are — but they're not making up the numbers either. The Sinfonia's recorded sound, in Chandos's hands, makes the case more effectively than any scholarly essay could.
