When it comes to a cappella vocal compositions, Benjamin Britten never surpassed A Boy was Born, the ‘choral variations’ he wrote at the age of 19 in 1933. This requires a group of boy’s voices as well as the usual ‘mixed’ choir, but it would be good if one day the Berlin-based RIAS Chamber Choir with their British conductor Justin Doyle could add it to their discography. They respond brilliantly to the many challenges of AMDG (Ad majorem Dei gloriam), Britten’s seven settings of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Drafted at great speed in August 1939, soon after his arrival in North America, they were then discarded – probably because he was under pressure to complete two major works, Les illuminations and the Violin Concerto, and then compose the Sinfonia da Requiem before plunging into another problem piece which (after its initial performances) he would set aside for many years, the operetta Paul Bunyan.

The Hopkins settings (unperformed until 1984) were originally intended for solo voices but the sonorous weight and burnished tone of the RIAS ensemble (recorded with appropriate spaciousness and clarity of focus in Berlin’s Jesus-Christus-Kirche) bring out the dramatic power and lyric intensity of Britten at his most imaginative. The fleetly flowing dance rhythms of ‘Rosa mystica’, the aggressively affirmative ‘God’s Grandeur’, and the harsh swagger of ‘The Soldier’ (anticipations of War Requiem here) all display the special self-assurance of the younger Britten, and it can only have been questions about their suitability for the intended voices and the possibility of further textural refinements that led to their abandonment.

The rest of the programme is more decorous – especially so in the gentle gravity of the precocious teenager’s Howells-like Hymn to the Virgin (1930). But there is still ample ebullience in the playful euphonies of Britten’s marvellously deft setting of Auden’s Hymn to St Cecilia (1942) and in the little suite of Choral Dances from the coronation opera Gloriana (1953). Finally, the Five Flower Songs (1950) were a Silver Wedding present for the founders of Dartington Hall in Devon; an affectionate, only slightly tongue-in-cheek homage to the great British part-song tradition.