Featuring Vaughan Williams’s masterly and intensely personal Five Mystical Songs, this album reflects on the sources of inspiration of some of his sacred choral works, alongside gems of 19th- and early- 20th-century English church music. Often setting the poetry of the King James Bible, the finely spun melodies and sensitivity to word-rhythm of composers from S.S. Wesley to Herbert Howells result in a uniquely British form of expression.

There never needs to be any excuse for recording the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams, but his 150th birthday anniversary most certainly deserves marking. This wide-ranging mixture of popular and less familiar choral anthems from the British Isles is attractive enough, but it is also crowned by a fabulous recording in a new version with organ of the by no means overexposed Five Mystical Songs that Vaughan Williams wrote for the Three Choirs Festival in 1911. This is indeed a programme that satisfies at every level.

A Vaughan Williams Anthology (8508021) 8-disc boxed set was released earlier in 2022 for the anniversary, which included some of the most successful Vaughan Williams titles on the Naxos catalogue. ‘There isn’t a dud performance in sight!’ exclaimed the Daily Mail (****).

Star of the Five Mystical Songs is Roderick Williams, one of the UK’s most sought-after concert and opera baritones and winner of the 2016 Royal Philharmonic Society’s Singer of the Year award. His Naxos recordings include a contribution to the ‘unusual and moving’ (BBC Music Magazine) Flowers of the Field album (8573426).

Williams’s recordings with pianist Iain Burnside include Songs of Travel (8557643) and Willow-Wood (8557798), and received a Gramophone Award nomination and was considered ‘an essential addition to the Vaughan Williams discography’ (ClassicsToday.com).