Each year the Three Choirs festival tries to include a major work that has become unfashionable and fallen out of the regular choral repertory. Last year at Hereford it was George Dyson's The Canterbury Pilgrims; this time in Gloucester it was the work that made Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's name, The Song of Hiawatha.

Between the two world wars, Coleridge-Taylor's cantata-trilogy was so popular that each year the Royal Albert Hall devoted a fortnight to semi-stagings conducted by Malcolm Sargent, complete with costumes, scenery and involving up to 1,000 performers. Nowadays even the first part, Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, is rarely heard, so the complete performance in Gloucester cathedral with Peter Nardone conducting the Festival Chorus, the Philharmonia and soloists Hye-Youn Lee, Robin Tritschler and Benedict Nelson was a brave attempt at rehabilitation.

The performance was very fine – the chorus, which is rarely out of the action for long, had clearly worked hard on rehearsing it – but it was only partially successful. As with Coleridge-Taylor's opera Thelma last year, there is no doubt about the attractive fluency of the music or its expertly deft scoring. But lacking in these cantatas – The Death of Minnehaha and Hiawatha's Departure follow the Wedding Feast, setting three of the 23 sections of Longfellow's epic poem – is any real sense of dramatic pacing or vivid characterisation.

The chorus delivers most of the narrative, with the three soloists contributing set-piece numbers along the way, though the four-square choral writing of the first part gives way to a bit more flexibility. But there's nothing engaging about it all: everything unfolds at the same moderate rate, and though there are some stirring choral climaxes, the descriptive style becomes rather monotonous after two and quarter hours of music.

• To be broadcast on Radio 3 on 12 September.

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