Blackford's music is gesturally direct, aiming for visceral impact in the scrunching orchestral discord that represents the moment the Twin Towers collapsed...the performance shows exemplary skill and commitment. But there's an earnest preachiness about the music which is a little wearing.

As one might expect from a composer so steeped in music for the theatre, this piece has a strongly filmic feel, with shades of Herrmann, Shostakovich and Walton...Gavin Carr draws sumptuously rich playing from his Bournemouth players, with the full tutti thrillingly underpinned by Christopher Dowie's organ-playing.

Unsurprisingly, given his subject matter, Blackford’s music is often violent and graphic in tone...Blackford has written a good deal of music for film and TV and I think that experience is very evident in this score, which is powerfully illustrative...It’s hard to imagine that Not in our time could have received a more committed recording than this one

a provocative, ambitious work whose libretto draws on diverse historical sources – presidential speeches, poems, religious proclamations – to sketch the course of conflict between Christianity and Islam, respectively represented by tenor and baritone voices...the choral textures have a vibrancy and dark energy reminiscent of Carmina Burana

Blackford’s choral writing sounds like reheated Belshazzar’s Feast, and there’s a lot of mundane declamation. Still, the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and Chorus deliver plenty of punch under Gavin Carr’s direction, Paul Nilon and Stephen Gadd are rousing soloists — and it’s not every day that you hear the speeches of George Bush and Barack Obama set to music.