Richard Blackford definitely has the knack of writing audience-friendly works with singable lines appealing to amateur and professional performers alike. The increasing spread of performances and recordings is testimony to that, although it has not always been thought so. Writing in these pages of the first recording of the St Francis-inspired Mirror of Perfection (1996, setting several of the Saint’s lesser-known poems), Martyn Harry was distinctly unimpressed by Blackford’s comfortable fit into the mid-20th-century English choral tradition, though conceded in terms of technique Blackford ‘scarcely puts a foot wrong’. MH’s assertion that anyone familiar with Parsifal or the Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes would find that the impact of Mirror of Perfection would ‘diminish’ was also wide of the mark; consonances of style with such forebears in some sections of Mirror neither detract nor distract from enjoyment of a splendid modern cantata.

And what a performance it receives here, from Elizabeth Watts and Roderick Williams, fully a match for their rivals – including the great Bo Skovhus, no less – on the composer’s premiere recording (originally for Sony, reissued by Nimbus in 2012). There is little, in truth, to choose between the performances, although I marginally prefer Watts to Ying Huang, and Hill secures tighter orchestral playing from the Britten Sinfonia. That, Lyrita’s more modern sound and the addition of the recent, substantial Vision of a Garden (2021) will likely tip the balance in favour of the newcomer. Nimbus’s reissue has a clutch of smaller choral works; Sony’s original (nla) had none.

Vision of a Garden is rendered very well, too, by longtime Blackford collaborator Stephen Gadd, with the Bach Choir, Philharmonia Orchestra and, again, David Hill. A setting of selections from Peter Johnstone’s moving ICU diaries (written following his long struggle with Covid-19), the text may be less exalted but the subject is not, and as topical as can be. A highly recommendable recording. Bravo!