This survey of more than half a century of John Joubert’s composing life focuses on works for a relatively small body of singers. The positive engagement with church music traditions is plain and unambiguous. Yet at the same time Joubert reveals his flair for bringing a sense of drama to bear on sacred or philosophical texts, thereby reinforcing his role as one of Britten’s most significant musical heirs.

The ample acoustic of Gloucester Cathedral is the setting for a programme which contrasts a pair of intimate anthem-like pieces with the grandly conceived Magnificat and Nunc dimittis of 1968 – music that moves with powerful logic from a well-nigh romantic expansiveness to the haunting repose of its final Amens. Most dramatic of all is the Rochester Triptych from the early 1990s. The poet’s juxtaposition of humanistic affirmations against Seneca’s unsparing view of mortality as just that – “after death nothing is” – may be even more powerful in its version for full mixed chorus and orchestra but the Gloucester choristers are mightily impressive in their command of its challenging but never unreasonably demanding rhetoric.

Here, as in the Passacaglia and Fugue for organ, Ashley Grote uses the magnificent Gloucester organ to maximum dramatic effect, while choir director Adrian Partington is no less successful, bringing out the warm expressiveness of the most recent music here, the Five Songs of Incarnation which was Joubert’s response to an 80th birthday commission. Words can sometimes be hard to pick out in the resonant acoustic but they are all provided in the booklet.