Submitted for the composer’s Doctor of Music degree at Cambridge in 1899, Vaughan Williams’s Cambridge Mass sat quietly in the university library for over a century, dismissed by academics as an apprentice work, until Alan Tongue produced and published a performing edition, conducting the work’s premiere at Croydon’s Fairfield Halls in 2011. It is that performance that is now released as a live recording by the Vaughan Williams Society’s Albion label.

Michael Kennedy has described the work as ‘the real Vaughan Williams on the way to greatness’. The emphasis here is surely on ‘on the way’. Tuneful and athletic, the Mass owes a rather too obvious debt to others – Brahms, Dvořák, even Bach – to discern the composer’s own voice clearly. There’s some accomplished fugal writing in the Credo’s extended Amen, some attractive touches of orchestration, particularly in the use of the brass, and a rather heady sub-Mendelssohn Sanctus that glows with the mysticism that would later gild The Pilgrim’s Progress. But the general tone is rather too squarely of bombast, and the harmonic language lacks the distinctive edge of the later (and slighter) Mass in G minor. The Bach Choir and the New Queen’s Hall Orchestra – particularly the brass – give a performance full of period character and verve, though a little more pace from Tongue might have helped some of the longer sections maintain more dramatic impetus.

This is a portrait of an artist still under construction – a vivid and fascinating glimpse of Vaughan Williams before he was truly himself.