Previous BIS releases of works by John Pickard have mainly featured instrumental compositions. This recording presents another facet of the British composer’s work, with compositions for choir under the expert direction of Martyn Brabbins as well as two instrumental pieces. The five short Latin motets as well as Ozymandias, Pickard’s opus 1, can be described as ‘occasional pieces’ composed during the composer’s student years or for the choir he conducts at the University of Bristol.

The imagined sounds of mass protest run through composer Emily Howard’s and poet Michael Symmons Roberts’s The Anvil, commissioned by BBC Radio 3 and the Manchester International Festival to mark the bicentenary of the 1819 Peterloo massacre, in which crowds protesting for universal suffrage in St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, were brutally crushed.

After his symphonic poem Má vlast, Smetana’s The Bartered Bride, is arguably his most popular work. This recording, issued by Harmonia Mundi, is taken from a live concert performance at The Barbican in May 2011, and leaves one in no doubt as to why Jirí Belohlávek has made the Czech repertoire such a splendid calling card during his tenure as Chief Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra.