A version of this appraisal of Lennox Berkeley recordings originally appeared in Gramophone in January 2012 and is reprinted by permission. The many recordings of Berkeley's music in recent years have brought neglected works to light and valuably support my studies of his life and work – The Music of Lennox Berkeley (2003) and Lennox Berkeley and Friends: Writings, Letters and Interviews (2012) – and Tony Scotland's double biography Lennox and Freda (Norwich: 2010). I have chosen ten CDs to represent this decade.

Lennox Berkeley (1903–89) came from the same generation of British composers as Tippett and Walton, all born in the first decade of the twentieth century. Berkeley is important because of the consistently high quality of his music, especially in the middle decades, and influential because he taught several of the leading composers of the next generation – Richard Rodney Bennett, John Tavener, Nicholas Maw, David Bedford and more. He studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris; was her most distinguished British pupil; and, like Copland, he idolised her. Berkeley was of partly French ancestry, so his love of Fauré came naturally and he knew and admired both Ravel and Poulenc. Neo-classical Stravinsky is an inevitable influence, but Berkeley's god was Mozart, an ideal to which he aspired in his own music. The finest of Berkeley's music does possess Mozart's stylistic elegance rather than the establishment qualities of some Walton or the philosophical conundrums of Tippett. From that point of view Berkeley can sometimes seem elusive – he is never over the top. But the musical rewards are considerable as these recordings of works from only one decade – the 1940s – show. Berkeley was at his peak from the later 1930s into the 1950s. If there has to be a natural fall-out of the music of a fairly prolific composer, then – with some exceptions such as the sacred music – these are the works that must survive. And Richard Hickox and the performers discussed here have done a great deal to see that they will.

1 The Berkeley Edition Volume 5. CHAN 10265

There are two Lennox Berkeley masterpieces here – the Piano Concerto is one of the finest British examples.