Commissioned and premiered in 1996 by the Northampton Bach Choir under David Temple to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Jarrow March, The Burning Road, a cantata for soprano, baritone, chorus and orchestra, is just one in a whole series of collaborations between composer Will Todd and librettist Ben Dunwell. (Other projects have included an opera from 1993, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and the 1995 oratorio, Saint Cuthbert.) Born and bred in the North East of England (as was David Temple), Todd writes in an approachable, but never patronising idiom, the bittersweet lyricism of his music offset by a keen dramatic flair; certainly, The Burning Road distils a compassionate warmth, bitter anguish and defiant strength that do not betray its stirring subject matter. Happily, the performance is an excellent one, combining dashing commitment and agreeable polish to admirable effect, and John Timperley's Abbey Road recording is first-rate.
Disc 2 houses an equally strong account of Britten's 1937 'radio cantata', The Company of Heaven, a BBC commission intermingling about 30 minutes' worth of music with prose and verse on the theme of angels (it was originally broadcast on the evening of Michaelmas, the Feast Day of St Michael and All Angels). As with its Whitsun successor of the following year, The World of the Spirit (so memorably resuscitated by Hickox on Chandos, 6/97), there are glimpses aplenty of greatness here. Sample first the drowsy pastoral that is 'Christ, the fair glory' and the contrastingly menacing 'War in heaven' which almost immediately ensues (where the male chorus arrestingly employs a form of Sprechstimme). Next there's 'Heaven is here', with its gently throbbing string accompaniment so strikingly premonitory of 'Being beauteous' from Les illuminations. Listen out, too, for the delicately chaste 'A thousand, thousand gleaming fires' (to a poem by Emily Bronte - and almost certainly the first composition conceived by Britten with precisely Peter Pears's tenor voice in mind), as well as the supremely touching, distinctly Mahlerian 'Funeral March for a Boy' (in this latter number I also hear intriguing echoes of Stravinsky's Apollon musagete). Given the current absence of Philip Brunelle's pioneering Virgin Classics recording (6/90), David Temple's lively yet sensitive (and, text-wise, slightly abridged) realisation will serve very nicely (both his soloists are to be preferred to Brunelle's), and this enterprising Silva Classics double-pack deserves every success.'