Norman Del Mar’s version of In Windsor Forest (the cantata that Vaughan Williams compiled from his opera Sir John in Love) made a welcome reappearance within Warner’s recent big box devoted to the composer (11/22), and it’s now complemented by this first recording of the work in its alternative guise with strings and piano. I’m happy to report that Michael Waldron secures splendidly articulate and idiomatic results from his assembled forces: the ‘Drinking Song’ (‘Back and side go bare’) bounds along with irrepressible energy, the eventful ‘Falstaff and the Fairies’ at the work’s heart brings an attractive contribution from soprano Rachel Ambrose Evans, and the inspired ‘Wedding Chorus’ to words by Ben Jonson (‘See the chariot at hand’) has an infinitely touching grace and tenderness about it.

Next comes ‘Land of our Birth’ from A Song of Thanksgiving (originally entitled Thanksgiving for Victory and first broadcast on May 13, 1945). It’s a setting of the patriotic ‘Children’s Song’ that closes Rudyard Kipling’s 1906 collection Puck of Pook’s Hill and given here in John Leavitt’s SATB version with strings and piano. Both it and Leavitt’s similarly sympathetic treatment of Nothing is here for tears (commemorating the death of King George V in January 1936 and incorporating RVW’s original orchestration with strings and organ) were published by Oxford University Press in 2020.

Written in 1928 and premiered two years later by dedicatee Harriet Cohen, the radiant Hymn Tune Prelude on ‘Song 13’ by Orlando Gibbons is heard in a specially sanctioned arrangement for string orchestra made by the composer’s onetime pupil Helen Glatz (1908‑96). It’s framed by two Bach transcriptions. An 80th-birthday gift for Pablo Casals and premiered at a London concert for the Casals Birthday Fund on December 28, 1956, the reworking for cello and strings of the chorale prelude for organ Schmücke dich, o liebe Seele finds soloist Thomas Carroll on hugely eloquent form. RVW’s love and respect for the German master likewise shines through in his 1925 adaptation for string orchestra of another chorale prelude, Wir glauben all’ an einen Gott (aka The ‘Giant’ Fugue, dating from 1735‑36 and published in the Clavierübung III of 1739).

Jack Liebeck lends stellar advocacy to the invigoratingly taut Violin Concerto in D minor that RVW fashioned in 1924‑25 for the Hungarian virtuoso Jelly d’Arányi (1893-1966), its unmistakably Bachian Adagio centrepiece distilling a sensuous warmth and rapt glow that will stop you in your tracks. Ideally supported by Waldron and company, Liebeck gives the most convincing performance of this underrated gem to have come my way since Bradley Creswick’s terrific account with Richard Hickox and the Northern Sinfonia (Warner, 7/88). Rounding off what is an altogether most desirable anthology, Owain Park’s exquisite arrangement for tenor and strings of the gorgeous ‘Silent Noon’ (the second of six settings of sonnets by Dante Gabriel Rossetti that make up the 1903 cycle The House of Life) is sung with bewitching beauty of timbre and unimpeachable sensitivity by Andrew Staples.

First-rate sound and presentation. Don’t miss this one!