For an aural snapshot of the distinctive Weir style I recommend track 11, a less-than-four-minute setting of a sonnet by ee cummings (‘a blue true dream of sky’) in which the poem’s skilful way with new angles on verbal conventions is perfectly matched by the music’s gently exotic use of consonance and melodic ornament.

As several of the items on this disc illustrate, Judith Weir has always been well able to conform to the conventions of, say, the King’s College Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols without losing all sense of identity and purpose in the process. Sometimes, as with the second of the Two Human Hymns, what in itself sounds like straightforward, slightly foursquare choral writing is offset – even estranged – by an elaborately patterned organ part. Even more beguiling is the use of a marimba to interact with the voices in three further cummings settings, little tree, and, at the other extreme, the appearance of a bold-as-brass trombone as counterpoint to the choir’s chanting of Psalm 148. The Gonville & Caius College Choir sounds suitably youthful, sometimes with an artless edge to the soprano line that does no damage at all to Weir’s expressive world. The recording was made in Jesus College Chapel, not quite on home ground, and in one or two tracks I felt that a less spacious acoustic might be even better suited to such intimate and subtle vocal writing. The undeniable advantage is provided by the new (2007) Jesus College organ, whose rumbling basses and raw, reedy tone colours are ideal for Wild Mossy Mountains and Ettrick Banks.