Roderick Williams OBE (b1965) is no stranger to these pages, being one of this country’s most distinguished baritones, equally at home on the operatic stage or concert platform, or in the recording studio. He modestly calls himself a ‘singer who also composes’, but this runs the risk of minimising the strong practical core to his attractive and beautifully written music, which deserves a much wider audience. Thankfully, Signum Classics has done him proud with a generously filled 16-track anthology which displays an astonishing stylistic versatility, varying from deliciously fresh arrangements of spirituals (‘Children, go where I send thee’ and ‘Mary had a baby’), to the lyricism of the Metaphysicals (George Herbert’s ‘Love bade me welcome’), the ecstasy of Baudelaire (a gorgeous setting of ‘Hymne’) and biblical texts, the gem being And a little child shall lead them. Little of this music will be familiar, save, perhaps, for the widely sung Advent antiphon O Adonai, with its crunchy bitonalism, and – at eight and half minutes – the most substantial piece on the disc.

Ralph Allwood obtains a vivid, rich blend from his 27 Greenwichian voices, eight of whom do splendid service as soloists, most notably Rebecca Leggett. Roderick Williams himself makes a cameo solo appearance in a vividly Handelian outburst, ‘Why do the nations?’, in his multi-layered setting of Quare fremuerunt gentes?, which also shows the influence of the fastest section from Britten’s Hymn to St Cecilia. Technical challenges also abound in Ave verum corpus re imagined, where Byrd’s masterpiece is reconceived through a contemporary prism.

For three tracks Jonathan Eyre provides sparkling support at the piano, including Christmas Bells (a jazz-flavoured ‘Bredon Hill’ from On Wenlock Edge), in addition to conducting the opening piece. Williams’s own notes are helpfully straightforward and the production is up to Signum’s usual excellent standards.