The British Project is composed of four separate performances by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and its young conductor, Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, issued as digital-only single performances by the Deutsche Grammophon label during the pandemic and compiled into a single album in 2021. It's not clear whether the whole thing was in the performers' sights at the beginning, but it may as well have been; it's a coherent and effective program. With Elgar's lovely Sospiri, Op. 70, as a kind of preamble, Gražinytė-Tyla launches into Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem, Op. 20. This work is not exactly obscure, but it's a youthful piece much less often heard than its cousin, the War Requiem, Op. 66.

Tragic love story: after her celebrated album with Benjamin Britten's “Sinfonia da Requiem”, the Lithuanian star conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla is dedicating her latest release to a composition by William Walton that has hitherto hardly been noticed in this country: the opera “Troilus and Cressida”. The stage work is full of energy, drama and surprising twists. First performed in 1954 at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, the opera soon fell into oblivion and is no longer on the repertoire of major theaters. The publisher of William Walton must have guessed what was in the work, because after the composer died in 1983, his publisher suggested the music writer and arranger Christopher Francis Palmer to create an orchestral suite with the musical highlights of the opera.