First performed in 1938, Dyson’s Symphony had to wait until the 1990s to achieve the recognition it deserves as one of the finest twentieth-century British symphonies. Although the symphony opens and closes in a mood of pageantry from the world of his choral masterpiece, The Canterbury Pilgrims, it is also a work of troubled times and the distant rumble of war. Passages of engimatic beauty and icy landscapes alternate with mock-courtly dance music and brilliant orchestral effects reminiscent of Sibelius, Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov. The Concerto da Camera is a work in the great tradition of English string compositions from Purcell to Tippett. The composer himself characterized it as ‘founded on old hymn-melodies so woven in, I hope, that it is not easy to be sure which are old and which are new’.