Many an aspiring composer today would relish the lucrative market for sheet music afforded by the late 19th and early 20th centuries’ passion for choral festivals, glee clubs and suchlike. Elgar certainly knew their worth, as this selection of splendid part-songs – composed over a 40-year period – testifies.

The youthful efforts include the Op 2 Latin anthems composed for St George’s, Worcester, the most distinguished being Ave maris stella, and two of the Op 18 part-songs. Elgar’s setting of Arthur Maquarie’s ‘Love’ is an absolute gem. The demanding Op 53 Choral Songs are strategically placed centre stage: what extraordinary pieces they are, sensational in their adventure. ‘There is sweet music’ (written in two keys simultaneously) was dedicated to Canon Charles Gorton, Rector of Morecambe and founder of that town’s choral festival.

The organ introduction to the 1901 Coronation Offertory O hearken thou picks up seamlessly from the ending of the last of the Op 53 set, the eerily dark ‘Owls’. The delicacy (and occasional fragility) of the Rodolfus’s young voices make the effect even more poignant. Allwood’s tenors glow in ‘The Shower’ and his basses cope superbly with Elgar’s taxingly low pedal notes in ‘Deep in my soul’. The whole choir blooms in Elgar’s greatest part-song, the unbridled Go, song of mine. At the other end of the scale is ‘I sing the birth’ – a late work of 1928, rather sparse in a Postonian way. Tom Winpenny (the uncredited organist) makes light work of Elgar’s substantial accompaniment to the 1914 anthem Give unto the Lord, which rounds off this hugely enjoyable disc with aplomb.