This inspired recording project – a synthesis of musical intersections and connections, repertoire new and old, arrangements and homages – has been so carefully conceived and knitted together that it’s a winner before you even hear a note. Once you do, however, it only gets better.

Ian Venables’s 2018 Requiem is the centrepiece. Already recorded in its original scoring for choir and organ by Gloucester Cathedral Choir (Somm), the novelty here is an added orchestra. That orchestra in turn becomes the textural thread connecting Venables to Herbert Howells, whose choral anthems are also heard here for the first time in new (or simply never-recorded) arrangements. Venables’s organ Rhapsody ‘in memoriam Herbert Howells’ completes the web of influence, tying this ambitious programme up with an (admittedly sombre) bow.

The whole recording feels like an exercise in the play of musical light and shade, arrangements picking out new moments in silhouette, recessing others into shadow. Take Howells’s Like as the hart, for example: in Howard Eckdahl’s orchestration the text’s water-brooks swirl and eddy with new currents, a reflective pool beneath the blended choral voices. Bolder and more striking is Jonathan Clinch’s new arrangement of O pray for the peace of Jerusalem, whose opening solo viola harks back not just to Howells’s ravishing Elegy but also to Vaughan Williams before him. Where organ gives vertical emphasis, strings exaggerate the endless horizon-lines of Howells’s phrases to glorious effect. Howells’s own original orchestral arrangement of The House of the Mind (never before recorded) is another bonus.

The Venables is an immediately attractive work as much (as others have pointed out) in the lineage of Duruflé and Fauré as Howells. Memories of plainchant, modal harmonies and gently melancholic English lyricism run through movements often constructed from small motivic cells that gain stature through repetition and elaboration. Simplicity becomes strength here – this is music that feels more sculptural than painterly.

Its innovations are mostly atmospheric. The composer arranges the Requiem’s pick-and-mix text without an ‘In Paradisum’, leaving us instead with a more ambiguous ‘Lux aeterna’, while moments of traditional articulation – the Offertorium’s snarling lions and looming pit, for example, the unexpected emphasis on ‘hodie’ later in the same movement – are heard from a new perspective.

Benjamin Nicholas (also the soloist in the Rhapsody) draws consistently confident, warm sounds from Merton Choir – at their best when galvanised by the organ and the very classy Oxford Contemporary Sinfonia in full cry. There’s nothing fey about their Howells but it’s the darker moment of the Venables – the knotty ‘Libera me’, the middle section of the ‘Lux aeterna’ – that really make their mark.