Belshazzar's Feast

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.