William Hayes (1708 77) was Heather Professor of Music at the University of Oxford, one of the founders of the historic Holywell Music Room and a staunch ally of Handel. This collection of his music for Georgian Oxford is sung exquisitely by the mixed Choir of Keble College, Oxford (reinforced with a few professional extras), accompanied in several pieces by the Instruments of Time & Truth – an Oxonian ensemble that draws from the impressive pool of locally based baroque players. Matthew Martin’s keen attention to detail, natural pacing and shapely phrasing guarantee that the varied music on offer amply supports Burney’s view that Hayes was ‘a great collector of curious and old compositions, and possessed of considerable genius and abilities for producing new’.

Handel’s influence is manifest in an overture from The Passions: An Ode to Music (1750) and a convivial Organ Concerto in G (composed in the late 1730s) played by Martin with breezy assurance in the Italianate outer movements and gentleness in the melancholic Andante. On the other hand, Hayes’s fondness for Elizabethan polyphony is illuminated by his adaptation of Byrd’s Emendus in melius (from Cantiones sacrae, 1575) for the unaccompanied English psalm Lord, how long wilt thou be angry. Diverse full choir anthems, several accompanied brightly by organ, include the Purcellian harmonic twists of Save, Lord, and hear us and the simplicity of To God I cry’d with anguish stung; the excellent choir sing with nuanced harmonic shading and flawless tuning. This superb advocacy for Hayes concludes with larger-scale music from the oratorio The Fall of Jericho (an oboe-laden Sinfonia and a magnificent chorus in which trumpets and drums make a dramatic entrance halfway through) and a lovely account of a richly concerted setting of the Hundredth Psalm.