It is now 33 years since Arwel Hughes’s oratorio Dewi Sant (‘Saint David’) was issued on Chandos, with the BBC National Orchestra and Chorus of Wales, Yvonne Kenny, Martyn Hill and David Wilson-Johnson. It was conducted on that occasion by his son, the well-known conductor Owain Arwel Hughes, whose special relationship with the work was forged on hearing its gestation at home as a child, one later strengthened during his completion of the vocal score for publication by the University of Wales Press. On the occasion of that recording at the Brangwyn Hall in Swansea, it was sung in English. This new recording, performed by the same forces and conductor but with different soloists, is sung in Welsh, to a libretto by the Welsh poet, literary critic and broadcaster Aneirin Talfan Davies.

Born in Rhosllanerchrugog near Wrexham in 1909, Hughes was a student of Vaughan Williams and CH Kitson at the Royal College of Music before returning to Wales to work for the BBC under Mansel Thomas. Devoting his life to the Corporation and to the promotion of Welsh composers, he eventually became Head of Music at BBC Wales in 1965. Much of his time was taken with BBC work, so his output was relatively modest, but he was not daunted by the challenge of large-scale forms such as opera, oratorio, string quartet and symphony, which he composed at intervals until his death in 1988. Dewi Sant is deeply reflective of Hughes’s interest in Welsh legend, literature, mythology, Wales’s religious tradition and the Welsh language as a vehicle for musical setting. Composed in 1950, commissioned for the Festival of Britain in 1951 and first performed that year at St David’s Cathedral, the oratorio has received regular performances and has remained one of the composer’s most popular works (no doubt aided by the availability of the vocal score).

Thoroughly professional in its execution, instrumentation and handling of structure, Dewi Sant may seem old-fashioned, even anachronistic in its indebtedness to late 19th- and early 20th-century Romanticism, its rhetoric and gesture and its quintessentially tonal language, but there are shards of a later modernism in the harmony which, at various points, clearly locate it in the 20th century. Some moments ring a little of Vaughan Williams, the rather haunting female chorus ‘O dyred Dewi, i wlad goleuni’ (‘Come hither, David, to light and glory’) is one such example with its tonic-subdominant progressions (reminiscent of the Serenade to Music), but this is in no way detrimental to the fine sense of technical control, fluency and cogency that underpins the work, an attribute accentuated by the impressive and graded climaxes achieved at strategic junctures.

The soloists sing with admirable conviction, notably the bass-baritone Paul Carey Jones in his vigorous execution of ‘Bwya, fy mab, paham y mynni watwar Duw’ (‘Boia, my son, O why wilt though so mock thy God’) and Rhodri Prys Jones (tenor) in the more lyrical ‘Y dydd Sul hwnnw, y canodd Dewi offeren’ (‘And on that Sunday stood David at the altar’), though he effects a more dramatic demeanour in the last phase of the work, ‘O ddydd Sul hyd ddydd Mercher wedi ymddangos o’r angel’ (‘From Sunday to Wednesday, after the visit of the angel’). Susan Bullock also gives a committed performance in her principal section ‘Pwy ddaw â’i gryman i’r meysydd gwyn’ (‘Who’ll bring his sickle to the yellowing wheat’), though I find her vibrato a tad excessive at excitable moments. The BBC National Chorus of Wales (excellently trained by their chorusmaster Adrian Partington) also make a fine and balanced sound, especially in the ‘Kyrie eleison’ and the closing ‘Requiem aeternam’. Owain Arwel Hughes brings a sure and faithful hand to his father’s music – a little more generous in length at 71 minutes than the 68 minutes of the Chandos recording – and Andrew Keener’s discerning production is of his usual high standard.