For the past few years the National Youth Choir of Great Britain has been among the stars of the BBC Proms, especially when it joined Daniel Barenboim and his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra for an uplifting performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Choral singing of that standard is always worth following and this two-CD set of Britten is welcome. What we actually have here is National Youth Choirs in the plural, all eight of them arranged according to their age groups. So the Boys’ Choir, young trebles, sing Three Two-part Songs to words by Walter de la Mare, written when Britten was 19, typically lively, adolescent pieces; and the comparable Girls’ Choirs take on A Ceremony of Carols, which they sing with élan. The main National Youth Choir is employed for Rejoice in the Lamb and the large Training Choirs North and South perform mostly sacred works, including the lovely A Hymn to the Virgin. Each choir has its own conductor but the standard is admirably consistent.

For the collector, the main point is not that the choirs are young and amateur so much as the numbers involved. Most of the notable recordings of Britten’s choral music come either from small, professional groups, such as The Sixteen, or the Oxbridge colleges. These performances are almost all on a larger scale – impressive in works such as the Festival Te Deum or the Jubilate Deo in C but a touch unwieldy elsewhere. No doubt the rhythmic part-writing of ‘Wolcum Yole!’ in A Ceremony of Carols is all there but it is difficult to hear it, especially in this resonant acoustic. One exception is the Hymn to St Cecilia, sung by the Chamber Choir, and very adeptly, too. First choice in this repertoire has to go to one of the many fine rivals – the recent two-CD set from the Choir of New College, Oxford, (Novum, 5/13) also includes more material – but the National Youth Choirs of Great Britain have given a strong reminder of their ambition and quality, if any was needed.