This is an enterprising disc, to be enthusiastically commended to those who like to explore the by-ways of British music and discover some of the enticing rarities to be found in them. Some of Sir George Dyson's choral music, particularly his splendid setting of In Honour of the City, has already been recorded and alerted us to his original qualities. He is a traditionalist, but within that tradition he exercised remarkable imaginative resource. I doubt if many will know of, let alone know, his short choral work The Blacksmiths, performed at the 1934 Leeds Festival. It is recorded here in a version (by the composer) for a smaller choir, with Bartokian accompaniment of strings, two pianos, timpani and other percussion, and it is well worth hearing.
Dyson came from the Yorkshire working-class, his mother a weaver and his father a blacksmith. The Blacksmiths, a fourteenth-century Middle English poem, was dedicated to the memory of his father and has a gritty strength and dynamic driving-power which are another nail in the coffin of the old canard that British music between the wars was parochial and inward-looking. If it was by Kodaly, we would have been drooling over it for years. Its requiem-like coda has haunted me for days. The splendid and splendidly recorded performance by the RPO and the Royal College of Music choir is conducted by Sir David Willcocks, a successor of Dyson as Director of the RCM. The recording was made in the college's concert hall, so altogether it is a fine and appropriate tribute.
Dyson's best-known work is The Canterbury Pilgrims. Christopher Palmer, producer and annotator of this record, has put together a short orchestral suite for the somewhat odd combination of strings, organ, timpani and harp, which works rather well. As an appetizer, it fulfils its aim. So does the ten-minute Nocturne for tenor, viola, strings, harp and organ extracted from the cantata Quo Vadis, music which shows that Britten was not the first to express the uneasiness of night and dreams in setting English poetry. Various vocal settings complete the disc. These though pleasant and charming, are much less striking. The Blacksmiths is the thing here, a revelation.'