Elegant, wistful and deeply expressive, Bridge’s eight-minute Lament was one of two duos performed by the composer and his teacher in 1912, and is today recognised as one of the most haunting musical dialogues ever written. Contrasting cheerful exuberance and a darker, veiled beauty of its own, Brahms’s second String Sextet in G major, Op. 36 (‘the most ethereal of Brahms’s longer works’, according to Sir Donald Tovey) provides the ideal companion piece, containing within its first movement a hidden cypher for Agathe von Siebold, to whom the composer had been engaged (but was destined never to marry) six years prior.