Anyone who disses Delius as all wafting breezes and pastel-hued gardens, try A Mass of Life. An hour-and-a-half, barnstorming setting of Nietzsche, it stakes a strong claim to being the composer’s masterpiece. It’s a work well worth getting to know.

Like his contemporaries Strauss and Mahler, Delius went mad for Nietzsche, and in particular his Also sprach Zarathustra. The theory of the superman didn’t just play into his ego, in it he found a philosophical alternative to Christianity. In A Mass of Life (or to give it its original German title, Ein Messe des Lebens) he raises Nietzsche’s high-flown ideas and poetic language to a spiritual level through music that thrusts and surges, that floats and ponders.

Written for large orchestra, double choir and four soloists, the score was finally finished in 1905, though it had to wait until 1909 for its premiere under Sir Thomas Beecham at London’s Queen’s Hall. Since then, it’s fared reasonably well on disc with Beecham its first champion (though his recording is no longer in...