When, towards the end of the Second World War, the BBC Drama Department asked Vaughan Williams to provide the incidental score for a radio presentation of Shakespeare’s Richard II, was anyone aware that he had also written the music for FR Benson’s production of the same drama at Stratford-upon-Avon around 30 years previously? In the event, VW came up with an entirely new creation lasting around 28 minutes and comprising no fewer than 34 cues, some of them of undoubted quality – I’m thinking of the haunting passage for solo viola that accompanies Richard’s Act 5 soliloquy in the dungeons of Pomfret Castle (‘Music do I hear? Ha, ha! Keep time. How sour sweet music is when time is broke and no proportion kept …’); or the infinitely touching string-writing that accompanies the King and Queen’s parting (‘In wooing sorrow let’s be brief’). Not surprisingly, there are frequent stylistic parallels with the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, to say nothing of the scores for the big screen he produced during the 1940s. Sadly, the BBC production never materialised, and the music remained in manuscript for fully 75 years until the present bold initiative.

Elsewhere on this fascinating Dutton compendium, Nadège Rochat makes the best possible case for the Fantasia on Sussex Folk Tunes, a engaging vehicle for Pablo Casals that VW later withdrew from currency after the March 1930 premiere. Yates’s support is as bright as a button both here and for flautist Anna Noakes in the miniature Suite de ballet that VW composed around 1913 for Louis Fleury (the dedicatee of Debussy’s Syrinx). Roger Steptoe’s expert 1989 arrangement with string orchestra brings out the at times intriguingly forward-looking flavour of this music (a perspective it shares with the Four Hymns from the same period). Lastly, baritone Roderick Williams is on exceptionally eloquent form in the Songs of Travel, whose evergreen melodic fecundity, raptly instinctive empathy for Robert Louis Stevenson’s verse and breathtaking craftsmanship shine out undimmed, whether in the bewitching 1905 orchestrations by VW himself (‘The Vagabond’, ‘The Roadside Fire’ and ‘Bright is the ring of words’) or those of the remaining six songs by Roy Douglas (including the sublime epilogue ‘I have trod the upward and the downward slope’, which was only discovered among the composer’s papers after his death). Again, Yates and the RSNO are at the top of their game throughout, making this an absolute delight from start to finish.

I can report that the SACD recording is outstandingly vivid and realistic – of demonstration quality, in fact, and testament to the skills of the experienced team of producer Michael Ponder and engineer Dexter Newman, not to mention the accommodating acoustic of Dundee’s Caird Hall. Strongly recommended.