Vaughan Williams: Where Hope Is Shining (Songs for Mixed Chorus, Including "Sun, Moon Stars and Man")

The Albion Records website suggests that this new cd, Where Hope Is Shining, may be the label's finest to date, and this is no insult to the previous three, for it is truly magical. For mixed chorus, namely the Joyful Company of Singers, directed by Peter Broadbent, it covers the composer's entire career from the 1890s to the 1950s in chronological order, and includes world première recordings such as Sun, Moon, Stars and Man, to words by Ursula Vaughan Williams.

It is worth listening to this record alongside another with which it shares half a dozen tracks: this is Over Hill, Over Dale, by the Holst Singers under Stephen Layton on the Hyperion label, which dates from 1995. Itself a splendid recording, it gives treatments of ethereal purity to Vaughan Williams' folk song settings. This disc has a rather more human acoustic with greater warmth, and certainly more attention to the dynamic range, so that the listener is aware of resources of great dramatic power in some of the songs. I would single out the folk song Mannin Veen, bravely tackled here in the original Manx, which takes on unsuspected depths of emotion, and a quite extraordinary Alister McAlpine's Lament, which had hitherto seemed merely plaintive but is now revealed as a very deeply-felt piece with some almost crazed choral writing in places.

Vaughan Williams' early work has often been seen as undistinctive and frankly rather ordinary, and indeed even the notes to this cd refer to the first track, a setting of Shakespeare's Sonnet 71, as "straightforward", which it is not, by any normal standards: and the second track, Echo's Lament for Narcissus, a setting from the same period in the mid-1890s, is even bolder, with melodic adventurousness and some mouth-watering suspensions, or crunches.

Also worthy of special mention is the arrangement of Henry Purcell's Our Love Goes Out To English Skies, a stirringly patriotic (in the best sense) ditty which ought to be considered as the next national anthem if Land Of Hope And Glory and Jerusalem fall by the wayside.

But the real jewel of the disc comes toward the end, in the form of Vaughan Williams' choral setting The New Commonwealth, described with masterly English understatement in Stephen Connock's notes as "remarkably moving". I was familiar with the tune - it had been used in the Prelude to the wartime film 49th Parallel - but I was unprepared for the sheer power and beauty of the vocal arrangement of this "glorious, noble, hymn-like melody". A very secular hymn, written to convey a message of hope in a grim post-war world. I defy anyone to listen to it without dissolving, and without being haunted by its wonderful words and music.

Attention has quite rightly, and very belatedly, been focused on Vaughan Williams in 2008, the 50th anniversary of his death, and there is a growing realisation that in his range, depth and sheer musical character he is the greatest composer England has had: and this lovely record is one more validation of that claim.