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Hoddinott's masterly output for orchestra also includes the cello concerto Noctis Equi, premièred by Rostropovich and inspired by a line from Marlowe's Doctor Faustus ('O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!'); and The Sun, the Great Luminary of the Universe, whose title he took from an apocalyptic passage in James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and into which he wove material from the 'Dies irae' plainsong and from J S Bach's chorale Es ist genug (also famously alluded to in Alban Berg's Violin Concerto), in which Bach embeds the interval of the tritone into the major scale so as to create ambiguity in the relation between tonic and dominant.

Like Mathias, whose major works in the genre have achieved lasting popularity, Alun Hoddinott was a choral composer of note. His masque The Race of Adam was presented at Llandaff Cathedral in 1961; a cantata, Dives and Lazarus, followed. His many other sacred choral works include Sinfonia Fidei, a cantata for soprano and tenor soloists, chorus and orchestra, a setting of the Te Deum, the Easter Anthem Christ is risen and the carols Puer natus (with organ) and What Tidings? (unaccompanied). His Missa Sancti David was written for the 1994 Fishguard Festival, one of several venues where the valuable partnership between composers such as Hoddinott and Mathias and the much-admired conductor John S Davies bore fruit; and Three Hymns, for mixed chorus and organ, for the North Wales Music Festival at St Asaph, also in 1994.

He wrote a good many song cycles, of which one of the most recent, Serenissima, was premièred in 2007 at Cardiff's St David's Hall. (His songs have been spiritedly recorded by baritone Jeremy Huw Williams on the Welsh Sain label, SCD2484 and 2318). Hoddinott's Ninth Symphony, A Vision of Eternity, is itself a song cycle, a setting of poems by Blake and Shelley, written for Dame Gwyneth Jones, a few years his junior and as Welsh as he.

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