This may sound impossibly recondite, but I have been waiting a decade for a recording of this work to appear. Petros Petridis (1892-1977) was a highly significant figure in Greek art music – itself a field still barely known outside its native country – in the first half of the 20th century, noted in particular for his remarkable endeavours to work with Byzantine chant as compositional material within a modern context. He studied with Roussel and Albert Wolff, and was a skilled orchestrator and contrapuntalist. A couple of his works, Byzantine Offering (1935) and two sets of Chorales and Variations on liturgical hymns (1939 40), are still reasonably well known today but this large-scale oratorio, written between 1952 and 1964, has been waiting in the wings for far too long. Its composer never heard it: the very first performance was given in 2004 by the present forces, who recorded it two years later, the score having been edited by the conductor of this recording, Byron Fidetzis.

The work’s proper title is Rekviem gia ton Avtokratora Konstantino Palaiologo. It is a concert Requiem for the last emperor of Byzantium, and as such a work of deep symbolism for the Greek nation. It is written in a mixture of Greek and Latin, drawing on texts from both and from Latin and imperial Byzantine rites; and while its grandiosity of gesture, particularly in such movements as the multi-sectional Dies irae, inevitably brings to mind the tradition of 19th-century concert settings of sacred texts (Verdi’s Requiem is the obvious comparison), Petridis’s writing is very much textural rather than melodic. It is the Baroque that principally informs his style, and homophony generally gives way to smoothly generated polyphony. Not that this makes any of the vocal writing ungrateful, it should be said, and in any case there are many movements of moving beauty, such as the setting for mezzo-soprano and soprano of ‘Agni Parthene, tou Logou Pili’ (entitled in Latin ‘Pura virgo’), of moving simplicity but perfectly calculated to follow the interwoven melodic webs spun by the soloists in the Agnus Dei. Another hugely impressive movement is the dramatic setting of the ‘Makarismi’ (Beatitudes) for solo tenor and chorus, intoned over tremolando strings, which precedes the glowing final invocation, ‘Eiselthe, Vasilef’ (‘Come, O King’). While the recording sounds a little recessed, the performance is excellent, soloists, choir and orchestra giving their all under Fidetzis’s ever sure direction.

The value of this recording is only enhanced by the addition of Petridis’s earlier Symphony No 3 (the final version of which dates from 1944 46) and even earlier Concerto grosso for winds and timpani (1929). The symphony is subtitled Parisian and it certainly sounds very classically French in its clarity and elegance, though it is also a work of considerable dramatic impact; in many ways symphonic form was the perfect vehicle for the composer to explore his interest in counterpoint. The Concerto grosso is one of Petridis’s works that has maintained a foothold in the repertory and its ‘objective’ sparkling textures and bubbling melodic lines will certainly bring to mind, as Fidetzis points out in his notes, composers such as Stravinsky and Martin≤, not to mention Skalkottas and other Greek composers. A hugely valuable addition to the discography, and a triumph all round.