Founded in 1815, Boston’s Handel and Haydn Society Chorus is the oldest still-extant performing arts organisation in America. For their latest recording with Harry Christophers, the choir delve into their own musical history, revealing not only a fascinating and relatively unknown body of English choral music but also exposing some of the traditions and practices of the American glee clubs.

In its earliest days the Handel and Haydn Society not only performed concerts but also published volumes of anthems and glees. It’s one of these – The Old Colony Collection – that forms the basis of this album. The 18th-century names here – James Kent, Thomas Linley, Charles Avison, Samuel Chapple – may be unfamiliar but their style is a recognisable fusion of the elegant verse anthems of Purcell and Handel’s oratorio choruses.

Kent’s Hear my prayer is an exquisite opener. Two solo sopranos duet with Purcellian poise over a colourful continuo from cello (Guy Fishman) and chamber organ (deftly and occasionally just a little outrageously played by Ian Watson), supported with occasional choral interjections from Christophers’s small chamber ensemble of singers. If not all the works can match Kent’s taste and invention, there are plenty of gems here, including Samuel Webbe’s When winds breathe soft, the lulling melody of the outer sections framing a stormy, contrapuntal central episode, and the anonymous folk hymn Hark! the vesper hymn is stealing, an exercise in textural restraint and endless legato.

Music by Handel, Mendelssohn and Mozart was also popular fodder for the society, and The Old Colony Collection featured choruses from Messiah and Israel in Egypt, Mendelssohn’s perfect miniature Peace I leave with you and an arrangement of ‘O Isis und Osiris’ for chorus, reworked as ‘Almighty God when round thy shrine’. All are stylishly sung here – possibly inauthentically so, given the original society’s well-documented breaks for ‘tuning’ of the alcoholic variety.