With the 17 mixed voices of Laudate recorded in the bright acoustic of St John’s Church, Holland Road, London, Priory is here lifting Herbert Brewer’s music out from the confined environs of cathedral choir-stalls. But when all is said and done, Brewer was a provincial cathedral organist whose only real claim to fame in the larger musical world was his involvement in the Three Choirs Festival at the time when Elgar was at his peak; a fact highlighted in the booklet by the photograph showing Brewer standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the great man – although a second appearance of the photograph within the text has Elgar cleanly but unceremoniously air-brushed out.

Any hints of Elgar have been equally cleanly excised from most of the pieces on this disc which, certainly in the first few innocuous anthems and the laboured Evening Canticles in B flat, reveal Brewer in no great light nor Laudate to be anything more than highly polished voices trying hard to make something out of nothing.

But salvation, as they say, is at hand for both Brewer and Laudate. Brewer can produce as stirring an effect as the next man and does so with relish in track 7 – an uplifting setting of God is our hope and strength – and thereafter in the two other sets of Evening Canticles, both composed specifically for the Three Choirs Festival, as well as in the only piece showing any real affinity with Elgar, God within.

And while some of his effects are blatant to the point of being downright corny – the persistent echoing of the choral statements of the word ‘tremble’ with two suitably earth-shaking organ chords – Laudate bring it all off with wonderful aplomb. This kind of thing might cause equal measures of opprobrium and ridicule if attempted at Thursday Evensong, but it works a treat on CD. Of particular note here are Joseph Nolan’s gloriously robust and virile organ accompaniments, full of character and providing a glorious double-act with a choir who, given the right music, can certainly get the hairs at the back of the neck to tingle.