This is the first new recording of Tippett’s wartime masterpiece since Colin Davis’s LSO Live version of 2007 and it arrives to mark the 80th anniversary of the 1944 premiere. Sir Andrew is one of Tippett’s most ardent champions and was sometimes mischievously referred to by the composer as ‘t’other Davis’. His interpretation of this work is well known and so expectations aroused by its eventual commitment to disc were considerable. Its greatest glory is perhaps the powerfully galvanised singing of the well-focused BBC Symphony Chorus – a broad spectrum of visceral expression across a huge dynamic range with every word clearly audible. And of the soloists, both Sarah Connolly and Ashley Riches are superbly eloquent and moving.

Less satisfactory here is soprano Pumeza Matshikiza, whose clouded tone has an unsteady vibrato at the top of the range. Tenor Joshua Stewart is better but his often penetrating sound is not ideal for repeated listening. The orchestral playing is impeccable but ironically feels almost too carefully studied at times. What also seems missing is the feeling of musical continuity and cumulative emotional build-up in performance. I wanted to be moved by this recording but can’t, in all honesty, say that I was.

Among other howlers, the booklet note gifts to the famously childless TS Eliot a six-year-old son, when this was in fact the autistic child of Eliot’s Faber colleague Frank Morley: Tippett loved recalling that the otherwise uncommunicative Oliver enjoyed performing impromptu handstands in the Wigmore Hall foyers during concert intervals. In my Gramophone Collection (7/14) I put Previn’s now hard-to-get version at the top and also recommended Colin Davis’s LSO disc. This new arrival sadly doesn’t alter that judgement.<