Boldly reimagined and completed by Martin Yates, The Future, a substantial non finito draft of a major choral setting of words by Matthew Arnold, dates from 1908, immediately after Toward the Unknown Region, and in the crucial year of Vaughan Williams’s three-month tutelage with Ravel in Paris.

Urgent ecological concerns – strikingly relevant today no less than in the Victorian period of unprecedented industrial expansion – propel the broad sweep of Arnold’s prescient account of mankind’s p...