Premiered on Radio 4 in 1991, Sword in the Soul is a product of another age – one in which the BBC (still striving to bring classical music into the mainstream) commissioned composer Francis Grier to write music to accompany a sequence of texts for Good Friday by Rowan Williams. Recorded here for the first time by Michael Waldron and his London Choral Sinfonia, this modern-day Passion is powerful, and crying out for regular performance.

‘Breaking and bloodshed – we didn’t think he meant it like this.’ Williams’s retelling of the Good Friday story is precise, understated. Everyday language (spoken here by actors Simon Callow and Samantha Bond) takes us from arm’s-length awe to the up-close human tangle of violence and emotion. Grier’s seven movements create meditative spaces around the texts as well as kindling fierce drama within, from an expressive combination of choir, organ (James Orford) and solo cello (Brian O’Kane, song-like here).

Grier’s Brittenish ear for melodies that sound inevitable even when they are far from it, his elegant astringency and sobriety burst out into vast, shattering climaxes. The arc from the opening cello solo, through chant-inflected choral entries to the engulfing first organ chord is beautifully judged, its carefully tiered drama mirrored throughout as Grier combines and recombines his unusual forces, fragmenting his choir, splintering singers off into solo episodes, before coming to rest in a boldly ambiguous ending that refuses to offer catharsis. Philharmonia Voices and Aidan Oliver released a superb film of the sequence in 2015, but this audio recording is hopefully the resource that will send others out in search of this deeply affecting score.

Following in the footsteps of Merton College Choir’s recent release (Delphian, 2/23), the rest of the recording brings novelty to the Passiontide theme with a number of new orchestrations. It’ll be a struggle to return to Bainton’s original anthem And I saw a new heaven with just organ once you’ve heard the brass fanfares of ‘Behold, the tabernacle’ in Owain Park’s technicolour arrangement, and David Bednall’s Nunc dimittis (after Finzi) acquires new spaciousness in the composer’s own arrangement with string orchestra, with its many idiomatic nods back to Finzi himself.