Hitherto, cellists have had four works by Delius at their disposal, although a fifth, early work was known about. That is the Romance (1896), which has just been published. It received its first British performance, two days after its premiere at the Helsinki festival, by Julian Lloyd Webber and Yitkin Seow last night.

The other Delius works have been sadly neglected by performers and left to the pens of apologists, with their familiar blend of blind enthusiasm and peeved reprimand. But, in Mr Lloyd Webber, for the first time since Jacqueline du Pre took the Concerto and Sonata into her repertory, Delius has an eloquent exponent able to draw out the long-spanned sequential writing and make emotional rhetoric out of a style which can easily sound merely prolix.

The new work proved to be a modest recital piece, after the manner of the Caprice and Elegy, carefully constructed, working its way through the bass, tenor and treble clefs to a central climax, and then down again. Although a comparatively early work, one could not fail to admire Delius’s sure handling of the tenor register of the instrument, so notable a feature of the lovely Concerto and, to a lesser extent, of the weaker Double Concerto. And, although some of the piano writing did incline towards characteristically block chordal support, given the feeling for the ebb and flow of the music which those two performers earlier revealed in the cello Sonata, the instruments go hand-in-glove to produce finely woven, gently nostalgic phrases.

In the triplets of the Sonata, one occasionally felt that Mr Lloyd Webber was forcing the rubato too hard. That apart, here and in the Britten opus 65 and Ireland G minor Sonatas, the cellist revealed a firm, well focused tone which spoke evenly throughout all the registers, with certain intonation and, above all, a cool, levelheaded way with the music which never overstated its case.

Keith Horner