Atalanta in Calydon and Vanity of vanities. BBC Singers, Conducted by Simon Joly. Texts included. Recorded in association with BBC Radio 3 at St Paul's Church, Knightsbridge, London on October 3rd and 4th, and at a public concert on October 6th, 1995.

Granville Bantock (1868 - 1946) was in his day a major force in English music, and his popularity was second only to Elgar. His music is fluent, colourful and melodious, influenced most by Wagner and Tchaikovsky.

These two works, 'symphonies' for unaccompanied mixed voices, are among the most original of his entire output. Written in 1911 and 1913, they are certainly ambitious - 'Atalanta in Calydon' was described as 'the stiffest task in English choral music' by Ernest Newman. The works use multiple groups of singers to build up a rich and diverse variety of tone colours and effects, using the chorus much as he might have used an orchestra.

The text of 'Atalanta in Calydon' is one of the great works of English Romantic literature, and the poem that made Swinburne famous. 'Vanity of vanities' takes powerful sections from Ecclesiastes. Sung here by the UK's finest vocal ensemble, the BBC Singers, recorded in association with BBC Radio 3, this disc represents a pinnacle of the English choral tradition.

Reviewed in Gramophone: "That crowning glory of the North, the well-selected mixed choir carefully trained by some local conductor, can touch the heart and compel the unwilling tear. O Young composers, waste not your lives in ineffectual rivalry of Wagner and Strauss. Go North, and learn what a marvellous field is there for you to work in." Thus exhorted Granville Bantock's teacher, Frederick Corder, within the pages of The Musical Times. The date was 1905, and it was perhaps with precisely those words in mind that, some six years later, Corder's multi-talented pupil embarked on the first of his two unaccompanied 'choral symphonies', a half-hour setting of texts from Swinburne's 1865 verse drama, Atalanta in Calydon. Written for the amateur Hallé Choir, it is an extraordinarily ambitious offering. Bantock's luxuriant 20-part writing (the composer envisaged "not less than ten voices to each part") exhibits a prodigious technical facility allied to a remarkable fluency and poetic sensibility. By comparison, the 35-minute Vanity of Vanities (based on Bantock's own selection of verses form the Book of Ecclesiastes) is a model of restraint, being laid out for a mere 12 parts. It was completed in September 1913 and bears a dedication to Harry Evans and his Liverpool Welsh Choral Union. Again, the sounds created exhibit a ravishing variety of texture, colour and harmony, further testament to Bantock's fantastically vivid aural imagination. Needless to say, both works impose great technical demands which are stunningly surmounted in these incisive, dedicated performances from the BBC Singers under Simon Joly, whose indefatigable efforts have been admirably captured by the recording team. A most enterprising and intriguing release. AA