‘“He was a man who used to notice such things” is the last line of Thomas Hardy’s poem “Afterwards”, in which the poet tries to imagine what people might say about him after his death. With this poem the barrister and writer John Mortimer would close his travelling one-man show, in which his friend Jon Lord used to perform. In the main work here, a programmatic six-movement suite for solo flute, piano, and string orchestra, Lord evokes the wit of Mortimer and aspects of his life and career. Familiar from Lord’s previous concert-hall works is the fluent, enjoyable re-imagining of later nineteenth- and earlier twentieth-century symphonic writing and the subject matter of “friends pictured within”. Lord outlines the “programme” of “At Court”, the second movement of the Mortimer Suite, to suggest something that Verdi or Elgar might have set: “John in his glory in the late ’60s, ’70s, and early c’80s… one of the great barristers, known for his hugely quick wit and love of debate. He also loved women…” On paper this might sound derivative or even coy, but the result sounds, delightfully, as if Bartók had been enticed to London in the 1930s to work with Eric Coates or Robert Farnon.

‘The central-European atmosphere continues in “The Trick Dance”, an illustration of the dancing-by-proxy which Mortimer, restricted by a stick, still enjoyed in later life. There are also bleaker moments, over which Sibelius and Grieg cast their shadows, as in the movements “The Winter of Dormouse” and “Afterwards”, and in For Example, a development of a piano piece that pays tribute to the difficult life of the composer’s teacher. The album ends with Lord accompanying Jeremy Irons as he reads the poem “Afterwards”. Performance and recording are both first-class.’

Mike Ashman, Gramophone (Editor’s Choice)