It was the Huddersfield Choral Society who made the ground-breaking first recording of Belshazzar’s Feast in 1943 at the height of the Second World War. Here that celebrated choir returns to Walton’s masterpiece, joined by colleagues from Leeds and by the chamber choir Laudibus. Yet the impression on disc – with the singers set way behind the orchestra – is of a relatively small body. That is a disappointment in what in so many ways is a powerful reading; Paul Daniel is a vigorous and generally idiomatic Waltonian, as he has demonstrated in his earlier Walton recordings for Naxos.

The vivid orchestral sound is most impressive, notably the brass, a valuable asset in this highly coloured work, and the choral balance improves in the central sections, praising the gods and the feast. I suspect that they were recorded at a different session. In any case, the relative distancing of the chorus in the opening sections, including ‘By the waters of Babylon’, will not trouble everyone, when beauty and poetry are dominant. Whatever the balance, the choir’s words are for the most part admirably clear.

In the closing, exuberant chorus, ‘Then sing aloud’, the trouble is intensified, for distancing brings disconcertingly cloudy textures and rhythms, not helped by Daniel’s extra-ordinarily fast tempo. In other places, too, he chooses speeds faster than are comfortable. The baritone soloist, Christopher Purves, is balanced relatively closely, and is generally clean of attack.

Richard Hickox with the LSO Chorus on a rival budget version (on EMI Eminence) has choral sound both clearer and more powerful. Best of all is Walton’s own, with superb, cleanly focused singing from the then newly formed Philharmonia Chorus, and a concentration and thrust not matched on the new issue.

Even so, the two Coronation Marches make an attractive coupling, well-played and recorded by the English Northern Philharmonia, the orchestra of Opera North. Recorded in 1996, they first appeared on a mixed disc of Prom favourites. My one reservation is that Daniel broadens the tempo for the fortissimo statement of the big central melody in Crown Imperial a degree too much first time round, leaving nothing in reserve for its later return. Orb and Sceptre brings no such problem, a superb performance that leaves one marvelling that Walton could in 1953 write a sequel just as moving and memorable as his first Coronation March.