Top billing on the front cover of this latest BIS release devoted to John Pickard goes to his 2018 Mass in Troubled Times, its title purposely echoing that of the Missa in angustiis (the Nelson Mass) that Haydn had completed 220 years earlier during the Napoleonic wars. Conceived expressly for the superlative skills of the 18-strong BBC Singers, Pickard’s rewardingly compassionate creation sets in music of giddy ambition, intrepid emotional scope and movingly reconciliatory power a thought-provoking text assembled by author and lecturer Gavin D’Costa embracing no fewer than five languages – Latin, English, Turkish, Syriac and Arabic. Suffice to say, it receives stunningly articulate advocacy here, and the same goes for the remaining six a cappella items, the earliest of which – the motet ‘O nata lux’ and a notably effective treatment of Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ – both date from 1983, when Pickard was a still an undergraduate at Bangor University.

Elsewhere, trumpeter Chloë Abbott and organist David Goode join forces for a magnificently assured and enviably concentrated rendering of Orion, a set of three pieces (‘Nebula’, ‘Alnitak’ and ‘Betelgeuse’) commissioned by the Welsh Arts Council and first given at the 2004 Presteigne Festival. It’s an imaginative, absorbing affair, whose central movement comprises two slow, pleasingly lyrical episodes (for which the soloist switches to a flugelhorn) enclosing a swifter section portraying the ‘The Mighty Hunter’ of mythology, while the work concludes with some hauntingly evocative offstage writing for the trumpet. Compelling, too, is Tesserae, a meaty 11-minute offering for solo organ written for Goode and premiered by him at Oxford’s Christ Church Cathedral in May 2009.

As should by now be clear, this is a marvellous collection, featuring impeccable production values and sound of flawless realism in the best BIS tradition. Not to be missed!