Dyson's eyes betray the shrewd and perceptive northener. They're set in a face slightly open-mouthed in wonder, and between ears as sensitive as radar scanners. The photograph in the booklet speaks for itself and Christopher Palmer's notes provide many more clues to the persistence of what has been in recent years unfashionable music. The Evening Service in D, bold as brass and with moments of cheapness and moments of ethereal glory, is a young scholar's 'home thoughts from abroad'. Written at the end of his Mendelssohn travelling scholarship at Dresden in 1907, where he had met Richard Strauss, there's a real orchestral feel to the organ part and an unbearable nostalgia for gothic choir stalls in the Nunc dimittis. Saint Catharine's do it proud, with great drive and great tenderness. I would have liked a bit more organ in the balance here.
At the other end of the composer's life span, the Te Deum and Benedictus, written when he was 72, show that his interests, though more refined now, had not fundamentally changed. The Benedicite, too, is a beautiful product of his latter years, artfully weaving the long catalogue of creation into a neat and tasteful sampler full of gentle colour. It's all most enjoyable, and exceedingly well done. The organ music is perhaps more contrived, but the choral music deserves to live for a very long time.'