Vaughan Williams came late to film composing. By 1940, when he started on his first such score, for 49th Parallel, Bliss, Britten and Walton had already enjoyed notable success, and in the darkening days of that first full year of the Second War, Vaughan Williams – with The Pilgrim’s Progress and related works (the Fifth Symphony not least) already under way – needed a project as his contribution to the war effort. His pupil Muir Mathieson arranged for him to score Powell and Pressburger’s tale of a U boat landing party adrift in Canada, and the mayhem they leave in their wake. Vaughan Williams responded with music full of high endeavour, colour and diversity – the U boat, icebergs, an Eskimo trading post, Hutterite commune, Amerindian festival and more – and the psychological conflicts of the characters, however much some may appear as caricatures to our 21st-century sensibilities.

In preparing his performing edition, Martin Yates found that a substantial amount of Vaughan Williams’s music was either unused in the final film (much of which has no accompanying music at all), heavily cut or – as with the German text of the Volkslied sung by the Hutterite girl, Anna, or the parts for a pair of saxophones used throughout the score – omitted from the soundtrack. Yates has restored these so that they can be heard for the first time, a significant editorial decision rendering comparisons with other recordings of this music redundant; for example, with Stephen Hogger’s suite recorded by Rumon Gamba (Chandos, 11/04).

This is a major release. Yates secures splendid playing from the BBC Concert Orchestra in what proves a big-boned, symphonic score – the uncut ‘Prologue panorama’ runs to nearly 16 minutes – bookended by the title sequence with its glorious tune (adapted in 1943 as the hymn The New Commonwealth). Dutton’s recording is beautifully balanced, not perhaps as richly warm as Chandos’s but clear and more than rich enough.