Jonathan Dove might be expected to come up with a pragmatic response in commemorating the First World War, and so it proves with For an Unknown Soldier. On one level, this 50-minute setting of wartime poems is demonstrably in a lineage of British choral works going back to Britten and beyond, though Dove’s selection is a resourceful one; not least with the climactic sixth of these nine movements, in which Isaac Rosenberg’s ‘Dead man’s dump’ – surely the most visceral of any war poem – gets a charged and cumulative treatment whose sheer immediacy makes possible the final catharsis. Elsewhere, inclusion of Helen Dircks’s poignant ‘To you in France’ or Marian Allen’s ruminative ‘The wind on the Downs’ endow a female perspective which extends the emotional range without obscuring that ‘anticipation to acknowledgement’ trajectory confirmed by the Wilfred Owen poems framing the whole.

As always with Dove, the vocal writing is finely gauged. Children’s choirs merge seamlessly into and out of the Oxford Bach Choir, with Nicky Spence a highly eloquent focal-point and Nicholas Cleobury securing an animated response from the London Mozart Players. Anyone coming to these poems for the first time will be left in little doubt as to their emotional acuity.

The main work is preceded by An Airmail Letter from Mozart (1993), not so frivolous as the title might suggest in its eight variations on themes from the Divertimento, K287 – arranged to emulate a four-movement ‘sinfonietta’ throughout which Melvyn Tan charts a lively and whimsical course alongside two horns and string quintet. Recordings and annotations are up to Signum’s high standards, making this disc more than just a memento of a major occasion.