Recorded in association with a live performance from Birmingham’s Symphony Hall in 2022, this account of Stanford’s Requiem from Martyn Brabbins and massed Birmingham forces thrillingly captures all the grandeur and intimacy of a neglected choral epic.

"Plenty of Watts, not enough power" was the headline of a rather dismissive review of an exhibition devoted to the work of George Frederic Watts at the Watts Gallery in Surrey in 2018. Poor Watts. Posterity has never quite forgiven him the enormous popular acclaim he enjoyed during his long lifetime (1817-1904) and, with the rise of Modernism, his posthumous reputation went into a decline from which it never fully recovered. Today, he's probably best remembered for Choosing, a portrait of the actress Ellen Terry painted around the time of their marriage in 1864 (he was 46; she not quite 17 — they separated after less than a year), but large-scale allegory rather than portraiture was Watts's preferred metier. With titles such as Love and Death, Love and Life and Time, Death and Judgement, Watts was clearly not one to shy away from the grand existential statement.

But then, grand existential statements are also to be expected from settings of the Requiem Mass, and Stanford's — admired by Verdi, no less — is no exception. We've been accustomed to thinking that the Birmingham Triennial Music Festival was responsible for just two choral hits throughout its existence (Mendelssohn's Elijah and Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius) but, as our triumphant recording of the Stanford has shown, these were by no means unique events. Stanford would surely have rejoiced to hear a performance as convinced and convincing as this, and we hope that he would have considered the eschatology of Watts's painting as appropriate — reflections on time, death and judgement lying close to the heart of both works.