If you’re game for an off-the-beaten-track musical adventure, this inspiriting album by percussionist Delia Stevens and harmonica and melodeon player Will Pound is a must listen.

In just 54 minutes and over 12 tracks the doughty duo explores the transformation of British music during the English Folk Revival of the early 20th century, when composers like Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams tramped the country’s hedgerows and highways collecting, transcribing and often reimagining what at the time felt like a rapidly vanishing tradition of national folk music.

Classically trained, Stevens is a BBC Radio 3 award-winning artist. Pound, who learns scores by ear, is a three-time BBC Radio 2 Folk Musician of the Year nominee. Together, their aim is to reimagine classical music, with its complex formal structures, through the fluid lens of folk. As the artists write in their emotive sleeve note, “Ascending is not about preserving tradition behind glass, but about letting it breathe, change, and rise – alive in the present, and always reaching upward, building upon what has become before and since.”

There are so many places...