Seven first recordings ping out of Birmingham Conservatoire Chamber Choir’s celebration of the composer, 90 this year, associated with the city’s University. John Joubert is as communicative and direct in his choral works as in his operas, symphonies and concertos but you can easily sense, in these pieces, a man schooled on Anglican choral music (as he was, in both Cape Town and London).

Often that directness is founded on a rhythmic impetus, as in O praise God in his holiness and much of South of the Line, the headline work here. Sometimes rhythm is just as important but rendered almost invisible by top-line melodic charm (as in the famous There is no rose and Autumn Rain). Always, text is the starting point. While some works have a Leighton-like underlying savagery that can bubble up via layering or counterpoint (as in Pilgrimage Song and some parts of Incantation), more recent works such as Be not afeard from 2015 suggest that Joubert has softened at the edges.

South of the Line, after Thomas Hardy’s Boer War poetry, can drift into the glib when a distinctly English choral language meets militaristic percussion. But the writing is always full of rigour and, despite the obvious influence of Britten, it could never be parodied. Joubert almost always has a crafty solution in the final bar of a work or movement.

In terms of sound, the confident BCCC are halfway between an undergraduate chapel choir and a conservatoire chamber choir made up of vocal studies students (which they are). The recording could have been better: it renders tenors and basses fuzzy and indistinct (bass tuning can slip and slide, as in the second of the Three Portraits) and instead homes in on the very able soprano group; but they can experience ‘vibrato disagreement’ and curdle at higher volumes and registers.