Here’s yet another fresh slant on the glorious Five Mystical Songs to mark Vaughan Williams’s 150th birthday, this time with the baritone and choir supplemented by an organ part specially fashioned by Martin Ford. Both he and the splendid Roderick Williams are at the top of their game and generate a fervent rapport with the Vasari Singers under their longtime chief Jeremy Backhouse (the central setting of ‘Love bade me welcome’, with its inspired incorporation of the Corpus Christi plainsong chant ‘O sacrum convivium’, never fails to activate the goosebumps). There’s more by the same figure in the preceding sequence of 11 choral anthems: O clap your hands is a gloriously affirmative curtain-raiser, while O taste and see (first performed at the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in Westminster Abbey) is contrastingly simple and serene – and listen out for the familiar descending phrase from ‘Sine nomine’ with which it opens.

RVW’s teacher Stanford is represented by ‘A Song of Wisdom’ (the sixth and last of the Op 113 Bible Songs, published in 1909), and one his favorite pupils, Patrick Hadley (1899-1973), chips in with the absolutely ravishing My beloved spake (such arrestingly tangy harmonies prior to its glowing culmination). There are two items each by Samuel Wesley (Wash me thoroughly and the altogether more ambitious Blessed be the God and Father) and Elgar (the powerfully emotive 1914 setting of Psalm 29, Give unto the Lord, and Lux aeterna, the last-named an a cappella arrangement from 1996 by John Cameron of our old friend ‘Nimrod’ from the Enigma Variations). Holst is here, too, with his 1912 treatment of Psalm 148, Lord, who hast made us for thine own, which borrows a 17th-century German tune (‘Lasst uns erfreuen herzlich sehr’) familiar from the popular hymn ‘All creatures of our God and King’. Harold Darke’s O gladsome light wraps the listener in a warm cocoon of sound – and who could not be entranced by the melting beauty of Herbert Howells’s Like as the hart (composed in just a few hours on January 8, 1941)?

One or two moments of strain aside, the Vasari Singers do a sterling job with all this material, and they have been afforded excellent sound and balance within the Chapel of Tonbridge School in Kent. If the programme appeals, this is certainly recommendable.