This fine issue makes an important and highly enjoyable addition to the series of Dyson works conducted by Richard Hickox on Chandos. Like so many British composers Dyson, even before he died in 1962, suffered neglect through writing in a conservative idiom that critics were all too ready to label ‘out-of-date’. That was ironic when his most celebrated book was The New Music (London: 1924), in its time an influential study of contemporary developments in music. Whether or not he resented the neglect of his music, it completely failed to daunt him. Not only did he produce a formidable sequence of new choral works even after he retired from his post as Principal of the Royal College of Music in 1952, his idiom remained unapologetically affirmative as ever, splendidly represented in this choral work described as ‘a cycle of poems’.

Originally written for the Three Choirs Festival in Hereford in 1939, its first performance was cancelled because of the outbreak of war, and it was only given its première in Hereford a decade later. Lewis Foreman’s note perceptively relates it to such works of the same period as Howells’s Hymnus Paradisi, Finzi’s Intimations of Immortality and Vaughan Williams’s Sancta civitas and Dona nobis pacem, memorably commenting, ‘Dyson was very much a leading exponent of this movement of agnostics at prayer’.

Dyson goes even further than those others in drawing on the widest array of sources, boldly picking out passages from such poets as Campion, Vaughan, Herrick, Shelley, Newman and Bridges in an elaborate kaleidoscope, mixing them together in all but one of the nine substantial movements, even rearranging individual lines from Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality. He also includes such well-known hymns as God be in my head and New every morning without hinting at the respective hymn-tunes.

One might have expected such a scheme to sound disjointed or bitty, but Dyson’s response to each section of his text gives a seamless quality to each movement, with ecstatic choral climaxes designed to exploit the all-embracing acoustics of a great cathedral. The warm but well-defined Chandos recording helps to heighten the impact of the singing of the Welsh choristers, plainly inspired by the dedicated direction of Richard Hickox. Each of the four soloists in turn takes a leading role in the nicely balanced sequence of movements, also singing as a quartet in the movements ending each half. The work culminates in the most extended movement, ‘To find the western path’, almost 20 minutes long, to a text that includes Blake and Shelley. After surging choral fortissimi, the music finally fades away to nothing, or as Foreman suggests, ‘the very elusiveness of his vision underlines the transient nature of life’.

The recording amply compensates for the years of neglect, just as Hickox’s discs of The Canterbury Pilgrims did (7/97). All four soloists are in superb voice, each of them strong, firm and characterful; and both choruses sing with fresh, incandescent tone. Dyson’s idiom may not be as distinctive as that of those other ‘agnostics at prayer’, but with its lyrical warmth and fine control of texture, with emotions often heightened by striking key-changes, the result will delight all devotees of the English choral tradition.