Invictus draws its title from the poem by William Ernest Henley, one of the poets whose words are scattered throughout the nine movements of this fresh look at the Passion of Christ by Howard Goodall, in which women predominate in his choice of texts. The earliest of them is Æmelia Lanyer, a contemporary of Shakespeare’s, and it is her version of Christ’s last days, rather than the gospel account, that threads through the narrative, looking afresh at such familiar scenes as the trial of Christ before Pontius Pilate, where we hear Pilate’s wife pleading for mercy for the prisoner. The fourth movement, ‘Compassion’, is inspired by the extraordinary life of Irena Sendler, a Polish nurse who, during the Second World War, rescued thousands of children from the Warsaw Ghetto; and the second, ‘Lamentation’, is an account by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper of a slave auction of children written in 1854. These testaments of man’s inhumanity to man are thrown into relief by the power of the human spirit to rise above circumstance, the theme of ‘Invictus’ and the conclusion of this work.

Goodall approaches the challenge of this diverse writing in the manner in which he is universally celebrated: as a composer who is unashamedly in love with music’s abiding values of melody and harmony. The opening movement wears its heart on its sleeve, with the tenor’s joyous cries of ‘Gethsemane’ ringing out above the ensemble. The tenor, Mark Dobell, catches the idiom admirably, couched between English choral tradition and West End musical. He is entirely believable with his fervent delivery of the lines ‘I am the master of my fate / I am the captain of my soul’ from ‘Invictus’ and in his boyish enthusiasm in Goodall’s gospel-style setting of Yeats’s ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’. He takes command too in ‘Easter Hymn’, a poem by AE Housman, where his solo could well have stood alone.

Soprano Kirsty Hopkins, most true in timbre, is very touching in the setting of Christina Rossetti’s ‘Song of Mary Magdalene’, her gorgeous voice endearingly caressing Goodall’s lovely new setting of ‘When I survey the wondrous Cross’ with which this movement concludes. Her other main solo is the slave ‘Lamentation’, a shade less inspired as a setting, the title more in evidence in the heartfelt introduction on piano and cello, poignantly realised by Clive Driskill-Smith and Jane Fenton.

Other members of the Lanyer Ensemble include two string quartets, two horns, double bass and soprano saxophone, often introducing each movement in a solo role and adding colour and spice under conductor Stephen Darlington’s watchful eye. Goodall’s scoring is luminous and expertly fashioned, though some may find the saxophone too close for comfort (though not out of keeping within the idiom of the music). Darlington has long been an unassailed interpreter of Goodall’s music, his Christ Church Choir a loyal custodian. I felt the Latin text in ‘Compassion’, led by treble Daniel Kelly, required clearer enunciation, and in those passages where the voices are in full cry and where the inspiration stutters momentarily a steadier tempo would have brought the text into closer focus.

Nevertheless, one cannot but fail to be moved by a work that wears its heart so openly on its sleeve.