Havergal Brian’s cantata The Vision of Cleopatra (1907) is the most ambitious work of his earliest period, ie before the composition of his first opera The Tigers (1916 29; 4/15) and epic Gothic Symphony (1919 27; 2/12). The cantata is not constructed on their scale, taking just 39 minutes in this beautifully prepared performance by the Chorus and Orchestra of English National Opera under their new music director, Martyn Brabbins. (Brabbins is currently Brian’s highest-profile champion; can we hope to see one of the operas soon under his baton?) It is given here in John Pickard’s expert 2014 orchestration, which has allowed this fascinating, long-neglected score, setting a prize-winning poem by Gerald Cumberland, to be resurrected. Brian’s full score and parts were destroyed in the Blitz in 1941; even by that time, however, The Vision of Cleopatra, highly regarded at the time but very challenging to perform, had languished unperformed for over 30 years.

Although Cleopatra’s rich harmonic language is closer stylistically to Bax or Bantock in Oriental mode, the whole is recognisably Brian. The musical argument is carried principally by the chorus and orchestra, which is not to denigrate the contribution of the four soloists, especially Claudia Huckle as Cleopatra, whose final soliloquy is exquisite. Chorus and orchestra combine again in the two 1912 settings of Robert Herrick, the wistfully intense ‘Requiem for the Rose’ and the more nightmarish ‘The Hag’. As Pickard comments in his excellent booklet note, they make a somewhat ‘lopsided’ diptych (a third setting may have been written but has not survived). The purely orchestral Fantastic Variations (1908) and overture For Valour (1904 06) both featured in Marco Polo’s pioneering Brian cycle. Brabbins’s meticulously prepared versions are appreciably swifter and more opulently recorded, and – avoiding the occasional tentativeness in the Marco Polo accounts – must now be considered definitive.