Histoires de soldats offers us two military-themed pieces from the New Zealand composer John Young. For An Angel at Mons, he’s done his research into the origins of this popular “apparition” story and worked hard to build a sympathetic portrait of John Ewings, one of the witnesses of these WWI angels, incorporating snippets of his story from a 1980 TV interview. John Young combines story-telling with suitably eerie and “magical” music and sounds, hoping to say something about the nature of allegory and make a wider statement about the human condition. A similar technique has been applied to Once He Was a Gunner, realised four years earlier, but now the theatre of operations is the second world war, and the person interviewed is John Young’s own father. I suppose there’s more authenticity, realism, and personal truth in this second work, but it’s also very prosaic; I prefer the Angelic vision with its mysticism and magic.