Time to be honest about Kenneth Leighton. He loved Howells as much as the rest of us; but while Howells’s music is often more enjoyable, Leighton’s is often far better. The booklet notes prove a little reluctant to describe it in terms of its own technical qualities and distinctive features: lyrical counterpoint; cellular transformation, like metamorphosis; the superimposition of jagged shapes and forms at staggered intervals, many of them rooted in dance (evident from the first seconds of this recording’s first track, the premiere recording of Lift up your heads). Leighton was a radical whose music springs from tiny charges of musical tension (premonitions of Adès) which in turn delivers taut, disciplined, intelligent, devotional works that are fittingly reverent even when roaring with frightening power.

There are two standout highlights on this recording from a choir Leighton knew and conducted. First, the cantata Crucifixus pro nobis, a miniature Passion as thorny as it needs to be (even when it sounds, on the surface, like a pastoral). Samuel Jenkins, the keening tenor soloist, comes into his own in ‘Christ in his Passion’ above Joseph Beech’s twisting organ. Second is Leighton’s Missa Sancti Petri, written for Peterborough Cathedral Choir in 1987 and clearly thematically derived from the composer’s seminal Second Service of a decade and a half earlier. It has that work’s knotty intensity, the spiralling architecture inducing its own terror. There’s the slightest sense, in the atmosphere and in Jenkins’s occasional nasal vowel, of a work more French than English.

Of the motets that surround those works, the highlights come early: Lift up your heads and Awake my glory – the latter’s fidgety twists and turns have the composer’s fingerprints all over them as it fizzes through a soaring poem by Christopher Smart. One or two of the pieces from the 1980s aren’t so convincing and his most famous, the Lully, lulla, isn’t representative.

The children of St Mary’s Choir might not have the purity at the top of their register that characterised the choir’s first recording for Duncan Ferguson – fortitudinous, driven Taverner (3/10). But this is still recognisably St Mary’s: no-nonsense singing, highly disciplined yet projected to the back wall and laid over well-behaved adults with well-supported voices. Do Leighton the service of thinking of this as a follow-up to the same choir’s Stravinsky disc (10/16).