One of Parry's finest works, magnificently performed, and the best of the two available recordings of "The Sons of Light".

This was the first recording of "The Sons of Light". When I reviewed the second recording, by David Lloyd-Jones on Naxos, I found the Lyrita preferable, with more presence to the recording, more vital conducting and better choral diction. At that time there still seemed to be no prospect of the many Lyrita treasures ever seeing the light of day again. Now things are changing and this is the recording to get.

I referred in my review to the "coursing energy and phenomenal range of colour" of the work. It is, in its way, one of Vaughan Williams’s most impressive. You would certainly never imagine it was written to be sung by children – 1,150 of them at the first performance in 1951, with the accompaniment of the LPO under Boult. What worries me is that, every time I come to it, I find I don’t remember it. It’s not just that the themes don’t stay in my mind. As the work plays I don’t get any sense of recognition – "Ah, I remember that bit now". I hear it as a work I’ve never heard before. This is not a problem I have with Vaughan Williams generally.

Though I also had the LP containing "The Mystic Trumpeter" I never really listened to it often enough to say whether it sticks in my mind or not. I should think it unlikely. I find the same problem here as with Vaughan Williams’s "Willow-Wood", which was also on the Naxos/Lloyd-Jones disc. The composer has very skilfully set the poem line by line, with meaningful upward swoops for important words, pregnant key-changes and so on. He’s produced a nice wall-paper backing to a poem that is far more exciting when it’s simply read. But composition is about creation. It is a constructive process. If you start with an exhilarating poem and finish with a piece of music with about as much tension as a wet lettuce, is this to be defined as composition or decomposition? A work for Holst completists only. The performance is good enough, though Armstrong’s voice sometimes billows when it should soar. Holst seems to have a whopping Wagnerian soprano voice in mind and Armstrong, for all her virtues, was not exactly that. There is also a touch of opaqueness to some of her notes on the CD, though not on the LP.

The Parry is a far more memorable work. The composer had the good sense to choose a poem which provides a refrain. He does not repeat the same music every time but provides a new variation of it. The result is a sort of variation rondo form, combining continuous development with structural unity. Parry is at his finest and most eloquent throughout, from the lilting opening to the dancing energy of the later stanzas. There is a satisfying build-up which dies away to a touching close. There is also a lovely solo stanza, beautifully sung by Teresa Cahill. John Quinn noted in his review that her word underlay at the end of this stanza was at variance with the new edition he was using and wondered if the edition had been revised. I doubt it; I have a copy of the original edition and the textual underlay is different from what is sung there, too. Quite simply, the music as written calls unrealistically for a third lung, so I imagine Cahill herself changed the underlay in order to take a breath in the middle. Composers who aren’t singers miscalculate in this way more often than you’d expect – even Verdi did sometimes. Read John’s review, by the way; he has had the good fortune to sing in a rare performance of the work and his enthusiasm comes from within. But did the soprano at that performance cope with that long phrase in a single breath?

If Parry is at his best, so is Willcocks. It’s a thrilling performance from a great choral conductor. This is the only recording of the piece so far, but now it’s available again we hardly need another. Just for the record, I have always thought Cahill a little insecure in her opening phrase, but thereafter she is splendid. She has a lovely disc of R. Strauss and Rachmaninov to her credit and, unlike Sheila Armstrong in "The Mystic Trumpeter", her voice doesn’t billow, it soars.

Maybe in 1912 the Parry seemed old-fashioned. In 2007 it just seems timeless.

Outstanding recordings, as always with Lyrita, and notes by Ursula Vaughan Williams, Bernard Benoliel and Imogen Holst.

-- Christopher Howell, MusicWeb International

A good specimen of lateral thinking here: at least in as far as it crosses catalogues, years and performers, and comes up with a new combination. Here are three works for voice and orchestra, two choral, one for soloist, written between 1969 and 1974 (though I believe This Worlde's Joie also incorporates two settings from a Cantata in Praise of Love written in 1959). They have a good deal in common yet enough separate identity for them to comprise an acceptably varied programme, the Elegy for a Prince forming a relatively tough and tangy item to be sandwiched in between the choral collections. Of these, Ave Rex is a set of carols, ''Sir Christmas'' being now by far the best known, and This Worlde's Joie a cantata in four movements, nearly 50 minutes long, employing a boys' choir as well as the usual forces of soloists, mixed choir and orchestra.

This, of course, makes us think of Britten, and indeed it is difficult not to think of him, and to a lesser extent Tippett, throughout the disc. In his useful booklet-note, Geraint Lewis acknowledges this but expresses it in terms of ''occasional points of contact and homage'', which is probably excessively diplomatic. We are still, I think, too close to these composers of our time to avoid the word 'derivative': in a few more years it will probably not matter or affect enjoyment, which, irrespective of such questions, is still quite considerable. This Worlde's Joie moves delightfully from one good setting to another, always contriving to unify the structure and work effectively towards climax and contrast. The Prince of the Elegy is Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, killed by English soldiers in 1282: a stern mood prevails, the orchestral writing harder and more austere than the composer's usual style though it yields to some tender expression in the last section.

Sir Geraint Evans, who gave the Elegy's first performance at Llandaff in 1972, sings with authority and dark coloration (for the most part the tessitura is low, rising towards the end and finishing with a sustained soft high E). The soloists in the cantata are excellent and I couldn't help wondering why more was not heard on record of Janet Price. Willcocks and Atherton conduct with vigour and care for detail, and the recordings are admirably clean. In the original review of This Worlde's Joie Trevor Harvey found the words ''not all that clear'', but this seems largely to have been remedied, and indeed one of the best features of Mathias's writing for voices is that he is habitually careful to make the music serve the words and not obscure them.

-- Gramophone [2/1995]