The Grace Williams revival continues apace with this very significant premiere recording of her largest work for the concert hall. The Missa Cambrensis was composed between 1968 and 1971 and first performed at the Llandaff Festival that year to mark the composer’s 65th birthday. She was the doyenne of Welsh composers and regarded with unique respect and affection by musicians and audiences alike. This large-scale setting of the Mass was her most ambitious score to date and widely anticipated to be her magnum opus. In the event, the performance in Llandaff Cathedral was badly flawed (as the broadcast makes clear) and the score was never heard again until another BBC broadcast, from St David’s Hall, Cardiff, in 2016. This was also less than ideal and so this studio recording at BBC Hoddinott Hall in 2024 is the third attempt at something of a legendary Welsh Everest.

In setting the complete text of the Mass Ordinary in Latin, the work’s closest British counterpart is the Missa Sabrinensis which Herbert Howells wrote for the 1954 Worcester Three Choirs Festival – another masterpiece replete with technical challenges. Howells was content to let his flowing contrapuntal lines represent the Severn, but Williams makes two crucial interpolations into the Credo to underline the Welsh context of her inspiration. At the moment when Christ ‘was made man’ she introduces her own treble-voice Carol Nadolig (‘Christmas Carol’) from 1955, setting words by the Catholic polymath Saunders Lewis that enshrine the Incarnation in vivid terms. They are sung with compelling innocence by the award-winning Côr Heol y March from Bonvilston, near Cardiff in the Vale of Glamorgan, not far from the composer’s native Barry.

Williams was intrigued by the immediate proximity of Christ’s birth and death in the Nicene Creed (marking its 1700th anniversary this year) and so she dramatically separates them by inserting the essence of his teaching as recorded in the Beatitudes. These are spoken in the glowing Welsh of Bishop William Morgan’s 1588 Bible, a role taken here by Dr Rowan Williams against a moving orchestral backdrop. Unlike the starkly polarising juxtapositions of Wilfred Owen in her friend Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem of 1962, Grace’s additions are deliberately inwardly embracing and enhance rather than undermine the liturgical context. Adrian Partington’s dedicated direction of his soloists, choirs and orchestra is clearly a labour of love and all who care about 20th-century British choral music should explore this enterprising Lyrita release. We must hope that these forces can now move to rehabilitate in similar fashion Williams’s only opera The Parlour – that really would put the icing on a burgeoning cake!