This disc of 13 anthems from the Choirbook for the Queen includes all 11 of its special commissions, and suspends the listener in time (as did its matching, 500-year-old bookend, the Eton Choirbook), giving the opportunity to survey how choral music in England looks in 2013. The organum-like motifs in Roxanna Panufnik’s Joy at the Sound are one of its most satisfying references to the length and depth of the tradition it is celebrating, as is the deftness of the organ part in Judith Bingham’s Corpus Christi Carol. In fact, it is testament to the inventiveness of Stephen Disley as a player that he makes the accompaniments so vividly varied at the same time as homogeneous with the choral texture – especially in Francis Grier’s beautiful Prayer, whose accompaniment not only provides a proper fifth voice to the bottom of the choral texture but a mystical obbligato part over the top.

If there is any criticism to be levelled at the choir it is the sound: at its most typically full-bodied here (as well as perfectly balanced and tuned), and therefore a little relentless when applied to such small vignettes collected together in the confined space of a single disc. But if the traditional, old-fashioned choral sound so closely associated with the BBC Singers is not an accurate illustration of how 21st-century choirs sound, no matter – the repertoire itself is still an action-shot of how choral music has evolved over the last five hundred years, and where it is now. This disc will hold that picture in perpetuity.