A recent survey by the BBC Music Magazine invited 167 performers and composers to choose their five favourite British composers – resulting in a very interesting feature titled The 25 Greatest British Composers of all time.

The results were perhaps inevitable, with a top five comprising (not in order to avoid spoilers!) Elgar, Purcell, Britten, Vaughan Williams and Byrd.

Accompanying this was a gracious paragraph where the magazine included ‘some surprising non-appearances’ – headed by Sullivan, Finzi, Delius and Bax.

However, there were no mentions – at all – for the music of Charles Villiers Stanford. This might have been on account of his birth in Ireland, but Stanford is regarded as one of the key figures in the evolution of British music as we know it today. While none but his fiercest protagonists would expect him to make a top five, I thought it would be nice to recognise his compositional craft, so below are two of his finest works, the heroic Piano Concerto no.2 and the bright sunshine of the Symphony no.6: