Commissioned to mark the consecration of Coventry Cathedral in 1962, Arthur Bliss’s the Beatitudes has spent the last 55 years overshadowed by the other works written for that occasion, Michael Tippett’s opera King Priam and Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. It was Britten’s score that impacted directly on Bliss’s work from the start, when the complexities of mounting the requiem forced the premiere of the Beatitudes out the cathedral for which it was written and into a local theatre instead, where it didn’t go well. It was eventually performed in the cathedral, in 2012 , but otherwise it’s hardly been heard since.

Andrew Davis’s performance with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, then, was an attempt to rehabilitate a rather strange and uneven choral work, whose strengths and weaknesses seemed very different in the Barbican from how they’d appeared five years ago in the soupy acoustic of Coventry Cathedral. There the vocal writing came across most powerfully, but this time it was the spiky orchestral prelude and central interlude that made much more impression than the settings of the New Testament Beatitudes themselves (mostly for the soprano and tenor soloists) or of the other texts that leaven them, mostly taken from metaphysical poets, with Dylan Thomas’s And Death Shall Have No Dominion providing the angry climax.

There’s much more of Bliss as a pillar of the British musical establishment than of the younger composer who had looked much farther afield for his models, and that’s a pity. Davis’s performance certainly tried very hard to give the music dramatic shape and intensity, but neither the words of the chorus (the BBC Symphony’s own) or the soloists (Emily Birsan and Ben Johnson) came across well, and the bland character of the music persisted.