This sparkling recording brings together an a cappella feast of short choral pieces composed during the past decade by the British composer Bernard Hughes (b1974). Leaving Oxford with a first-class degree, Hughes went on to Goldsmiths College where he studied composition with Peter Dickinson and – privately – with Param Vir. He is currently Composer-in-Residence at St Paul’s School, London, and has enjoyed a 20-year association with the BBC Singers, for whom he wrote Birdchant, which was premiered at the 2021 BBC Proms, and many of the works in this programme. This selection is brimful with a wide variety of mood and texture, and technical challenges aplenty for the 27 members of the London-based Epiphoni Consort and its founder-director, Tim Reader.

As a starting point, the unsuspecting listener ought, perhaps, to drop in on the delicious Two Songs of Spring (2018). Oft-set texts by Nashe and Shakespeare are presented here in refreshing and entertaining upper-voice raiment. ‘Spring, the sweete spring’ is rhythmically perfect, and its avian conclusion highly effective and entertaining. ‘It was a lover and his lasse’ is a veritable earworm. It is worth buying the album just to repeatedly enjoy this song.

The sheer versatility of Epiphoni’s full choral strength is best demonstrated in the three movements of Precious Things (2020), which are settings of texts by friends. The more robust moments are truly gripping, especially the tripping insistency of ‘Crude’ and the parallel glissandos in ‘All the gold in the world’.

The centrepiece of the programme is the multi-movement I Sing of Love (2012), which veers from increasingly stressful clustered textures in ‘Meditation II’ to the sheer, lush close-harmony beauty of ‘Love is patient, love is kind’, topped off by Becky Ryland-Jones’s clear ‘white’ soaring descant. Just occasionally there is a sense of a slip in the tuning, for example in If we shadows have offended and in the utterly beguiling Vocalise, the latter composed especially for this recording, which concludes an enriching anthology enhanced by Delphian’s engineering team, who have done a superb job in the spacious acoustic of All Hallows’, Gospel Oak.