Sir John Blackwood McEwen (1868-1948) is part of an extraordinary generation of composers that established the Romantic tradition in England. McEwen draws on the same sacred and secular sources as Charles Villiers Stanford and Charles Hubert Parry, and it should come as no surprise that Chandos has been aggressively promoting the works of all three men over the past decade. McEwen"s Hymn on the Morning of Christ"s Nativity is a 1905 oratorio, more secular than sacred, that has survived only in an unperformed final draft version. Based on Milton"s famous ode, Hymn lacks the stodginess of your typical fin-de-siècle church hymn. Instead, Alasdair Mitchell and the Brighton Festival Chorus invest the work with buoyancy and unexpected cheer. --Paul Cook