Chandos already has a Parry catalogue to reckon with, including several of the secular choral works directed by Matthias Bamert. Why the Invocation to Music in particular has not won more attention from choral societies, festivals or record labels may be set down to assumptions and prejudices around the kind of twirled-moustache, Victorian-gentleman persona which the composer’s appearance does nothing to dispel.

This album of Prometheus Unbound deserves to effect a sea change. Parry was 32 when he wrote it, with experience of both sacred and secular forms behind him, and elected to distil episodes from Shelley’s version of Aeschylus for his first Three Choirs Festival commission. The form is peculiar unto itself: a 35-minute Introduction to a 25-minute Part 2, itself divided in two scenes. A concise prelude makes good use, appropriately enough, of the germinal motif in Liszt’s Les préludes, especially when led by the bassoon (1'20") into the first of the cantata’s many Wagnerian cadences.

Jeremy Dibble’s essay brings light to the heat that this aspect of Parry’s work generated after its premiere in 1880. We are surely now beyond the pro- and anti-Wagner factions of the time, and can appreciate on its own terms the ingenuity of the composer’s borrowings and transformations, notably from The Ring, and in particular from the Gibichung scenes of its final instalment.

Glowering brass punctuation of nobly arching bass recitatives, rabble-rousing stuff for the male chorus, a vatic mezzo part, silky modulation between sections so that the hour-long whole unfolds in three large sections: all that’s missing from this English second-act Götterdämmerung are actual steer-horns. It would not be such a pleasure to register the source materials for Parry’s inspiration had he not so skilfully woven them into a fabric of his own making, distinctively not just English but (I suppose we must say) Parryan, familiar in its modal flavours and remarkably effortless reach for sublimity from the part-songs and anthems embedded within English choral culture.

Standing at one remove from that culture, though, is the essential humanism of the legend, and the vitality of Parry’s response to Shelley’s translation of it; there is a Chorus of Furies early on that reminds me of Mendelssohn’s Die erste Walpurgisnacht, and the violence of his choral writing there compared to the toothless worshippers of Baal in Elijah. Had Elgar found a better librettist than Acworth for Caractacus, he would surely have come nearer in his own formative period to emulating this vitality.

Worthy and welcome though those earlier Bamert/Chandos albums were, they pale in energy, in precision and conviction beside the performances here. The soloists are placed well forwards of the orchestra in an ‘oratorio-authentic’ balance that irresistibly evokes a Saturday evening in a good-sized parish church (in this instance, St Jude on the Hill in Hampstead), filled to the rafters by friends and relations of the local choral society. The casting, however, is more glamorous than such an audience would have any right to expect.

Sarah Connolly fulfils all expectations in an Erda-like arioso to cap the first part, and to her is allotted the loveliest solo number with the best tune, a ‘spring is come’ aria of Sieglinde-like appeal. David Butt Philip brings ringing heroism to Jupiter on his throne. Neal Davies’s bass is broader than in former years, and all the better suited to the kind of Wotan-size declamation demanded of him here.

There is no trace of rehearse-record about the sweetness of the London Mozart Players’ strings, or lack of weight to the ensemble. Indeed, the album is capped by an account of Blest Pair of Sirens red in tooth and claw, a good deal juicier than the grey roast beef of Boult’s EMI version, which served as a filler for The Music Makers on LP (5/67). This is again a matter of taut pacing on Vann’s part, but also of sharing with his musicians and listeners a belief in the music that bears comparison with John Wilson’s efforts on behalf of Howells or Coates. Back in 1907, according to Dibble, it was claimed that Parry’s Prometheus Unbound marked ‘a definite birthday for modern English music’. Such a claim, far-fetched on paper, deserves taking seriously on the strength of this revival. I cannot promise conversion, but sceptics are invited to give it a fair hearing.