A word, first, to like-minded readers for whom ‘inspirational’ is a pejorative term: this, despite suspicions it might at first arouse, is not an inspirational disc. The notes explain that it originated in a concert on the first anniversary of the atrocity of September 11, 2001, and it does begin with Barber’s Adagio in its choral arrangement. And, followed by two gently flowing movements from Duruflé’s Requiem and Bernstein’s setting of the 23rd Psalm, it does look like one of those sequences where all is slow and ‘lovely’, and where the idea that consolation might be found in (say) a Haydn Allegro just isn’t ‘on’. But no: it is stronger than that. Ives’s Psalm 90 makes the difference. A composition so specific in its responses can’t be listened to as a wash of sound. Stravinsky, too, with his syllabic impersonality; Vaughan Williams, with his intelligent texts; even Verdi with his ‘enigmatic scale’; and, perhaps above all, Schoenberg with his supremely imaginative setting of an unusually thoughtful poem.

This is a famous and long-established choir from the College in Princeton, New Jersey. The voices are firm, the balance is well-judged, and of the arts of choral singing on display here they have mastery. Soloists, accompaniment, recorded sound and Malcolm Bruno’s essay are all fine.