Rutter’s arrangement of seven spirituals (eight if you include the surreptitious appearance of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” in “Deep River”), Feel the Spirit, has appeared twice on disc previously. Rutter’s own recording (Collegium, 10/01) is, of course, immaculately polished, the singers entirely at home – maybe even a touch blasé – with their director’s music. With somewhere in the region of 70 amateur voices at his disposal, Andrew Padmore doesn’t achieve anything like the same level of precision but clearly his Yorkshire Philharmonic Choir are enjoying themselves immensely, and that provides a major boost to these spirited performances.

More than either the slick BBC Concert Orchestra (for Rutter) or the ragged Oxford Company of Musicians (for Michael Smedley on OxRecs), the Amici Ensemble are having a ball with Rutter’s ingenious accompaniments. Whether it’s a Satchmo-esque trumpet (“Joshua fit the Battle of Jericho”), a Dixieland clarinet (“When the Saints”), the woodwind doing their Scott Joplin bit (“I got a robe”) or the whole band having fun with Rutter’s blatant word-painting (not least when the Walls of Jericho do their tumblin’), Padmore lets them have their many moments of merry-making and, coupled with his steady hand on the tiller, this all adds up to a really captivating performance of this hugely enjoyable score.

It was for Melanie Marshall that Rutter originally wrote Feel the Spirit in 2001 and this disc, more even than her appearance on his, shows why. She is simply a natural for this kind of music, treading a perfect balance between cliché and sincerity and oozing the kind of naturalness which, I’m afraid, Jacqueline Dankworth (for Smedley) misses by a mile.

The pairing of this with the Fauré Requiem defies belief; what were they thinking of? Perhaps the connection is that the Yorkshire Philharmonic are using Rutter’s version, but their performance is so lacklustre and cloudy, not helped by a recording (the location rather than the engineering, I suspect) which can best be described as “rubbery”, that I wouldn’t like to say for certain which version this is – and the paltry booklet-notes offer no help. Ignore the Fauré; this disc is worth it simply for the sheer joy of the Rutter piece.