The Pilgrim’s Progress was an opera which Vaughan Williams spent over forty years of his life perfecting: he composed some of the incidental music for an amateur production in 1906, including the hymn-tune York, but the first performance was not given until April 1951 as part of the Festival of Britain, opening and closing with that same tune.

As a consequence, the music is wide-ranging in style, from the robust Fourth Symphony to the meditative beauty of the Tallis Fantasia, and from the passionate London Symphony to the enigmatic final symphony, No. 9.

A self-professed agnostic, the subject matter might have seemed a somewhat unusual choice for Vaughan Williams; yet he wrote in a letter in May 1951 that he wanted the music to “apply to anybody who aims at the spiritual life”; and certainly the uplifting message of the music is a universal one.