Scorned by most critics but greeted with gratitude by grieving Armistice Day audiences in the 1920s, John Foulds’s A World Requiem has spent nearly all its unusual life sleeping on a shelf. Even when arcane Foulds works have been revived, exploring conductors have tiptoed around this adventurous British composer’s one big hit.

Until now. You have to hand it to the BBC for mustering the curiosity and resources to awaken this enigmatic score and give it another chance in the venue in which it was born. Grandiose sound fused with a grandiose space: as fanfares and youthful voices rang from the galleries’ four points, and the brass-fat orchestra, massed choirs and organ raised the roof, it was easy to be thrilled. But could Foulds’s music, and the text’s compilation of Christian and Hindu words, carry us with hearts engaged through 100 minutes?

Yes and no. Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet’s wobbly soprano aside, the forces commanded by the daredevil conductor Leon Botstein served up many beauties, generally composed in a style mixing plainsong with the modal gestures that we’ve come to associate with Vaughan Williams. Gerald Finley and Stuart Skelton, baritone and tenor, were exceptionally eloquent; and the BBC Symphony Orchestra feasted on Foulds’s cultivated orchestrations, with no effect overplayed, from shimmering percussion and quarter-tone strings to bulbous brass.

True, Foulds does some thumb-twiddling, making music without bones. But the libretto twiddles far more. Too long; too many words, the bulk of them generalities that force the 21st-century listener to stand at a respectful distance. We needed the equivalent of Wilfred Owen’s poems in Britten’s War Requiem to plunge us into individual stories and tragedies. Nothing of that here; no sense of the trenches’ blood and mud. By design, Foulds was taking a loftier, more monumental view of the pity of war, in line with the work’s original tagline, “a Cenotaph in Sound”.

A jumble, then: of its time and out of time; conventional and modernist; often thrilling, occasionally blank. And a justified revival. If you missed the performance or the Radio 3 broadcast, Chandos will be issuing it on disc in January.

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