One would have to travel very far to find an album of British a cappella (mostly) music as beautifully sung as this. The six composers featured are among the most celebrated for lyrical and vocal composition, yet many of the works will be unfamiliar – at least in their entireties – to the listening public. It is greatly to The Sixteen’s (and Harry Christophers’s) credit that they open with all eight of Stanford’s delightful Partsongs, Op 119 (1910), rather than just cherry-picking the famous one (‘The Blue Bird’). The texts of the then not-long-deceased Mary Elizabeth Coleridge vary from depictions of nature – ‘The Swallow’, for instance – to the man-made, ‘The Train’ and ‘Chillingham’ (after the Northumbrian castle), plus her biting attack on, presumably, critics, ‘The Inkbottle’.

Coleridge had a champion in Robert Bridges, seven of whose poems were set exquisitely by Finzi between 1931 and 1939 as his Op 17 and are here given whole. The best known is the out-and-out love poem ‘My spirit sang all day’, the setting made no doubt with his new wife, Joy (this word, much repeated, permeating the song), in mind. More fascinating still is Imogen Holst’s cycle to words by Keats, Welcome Joy and Welcome Sorrow (1950). The use of an accompanying harp recalls A Ceremony of Carols and her father’s third group of Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda, with which this set compares well; but then Imogen was a fine word-setter. (Devonians will adore the second song, ‘Teignmouth’, with its repeated invocation to go ‘over the hills to Dawlish’!)

Arguably the subtlest 20th-century setter of English after Britten was Elizabeth Maconchy, and her vivid motet Sirens’ Song is both title work and heart of the programme. A tour de force of composition for two small choral groups placed either side of the stage (or microphones), here is a world entirely conjured in under five minutes, though time seems suspended during its compelling, concentrated discourse. Even her teacher, Vaughan Williams, could not quite match that in his otherwise wonderful Silence and Music (written as part of A Garland for the Queen in 1953), nor Sullivan in his ubiquitous The Long Day Closes (1868), which concludes the programme in the composer’s mixed-choral arrangement.

The Sixteen’s singing, like Mike Hatch’s recording, is as excellent as one would expect. This is truly an album to transport one to another place, though perhaps not in Stanford’s clattery Train! Highly recommended.