Success is a double-edged sword. Become composer-in-residence of a popular classical radio station, feted by the masses and commissioned by royalty, and expect an avalanche of negative comments from a band of critics for whom epithets such as ‘sweet harmonies’, ‘light, tuneful melodies’ and ‘benign mood music’ are to music what a cold shower is to a hydrophobic cat. Patrick Hawes’s Revelation makes a convincing case that there is more to his music than the nice veneer that glossed recent releases such as ‘Angel’ and ‘Blue in Blue’, and heard here on the ever-popular Quanta Qualia.

If nothing else, Revelation – settings of the Biblical text in seven short sections, bookended with a prologue and epilogue – demonstrates the scope of Hawes’s musical style. His direct and immediate response to the text from the Book of Revelation produces moments of vivid word-painting, such as the doom-laden descending line at the end of ‘Fallen is Babylon the Great’. Stark contrasts are set up between beginning and end in the Epilogue, ‘The Alpha and the Omega’. Hawes explores more distant tonal relationships in ‘Coming with the Clouds’. He shows how inventive he can be with harmony in ‘From the Throne’ – moving lines in contrary motion to create crunchy dissonances – then cleverly melds mellifluous modal melodies with bright tonal interjections in ‘A Great and Wondrous Sign’. Noel Edison and The Elora Singers do much to bring the music to life in a wonderfully resonant and energetic performance.

If the text of Revelation, with its dramatic contrasts of darkness and light, good and evil, jolts Hawes out of his comfort zone, Beatitudes appears to have done the opposite. We are back in the composer’s more familiar tonal landscape, but it’s nevertheless difficult to resist the calm, serene beauty and simplicity that belongs to ‘The Pure in Heart’ and ‘The Peacemakers’, or the life-affirming Be Still. Revelation shows that Hawes’s music can be creative and compelling, revealing itself in several different ways.