James MacMillan’s music unashamedly wears its heart on its sleeve, testifying to the composer’s various passionate convictions. Most of these are represented here, particularly the Scots cultural tradition and liberation theology. The album takes its title, Cantos Sagrados (‘Sacred Songs’), from the 1989 work for choir and organ, which sets poems by Ariel Dorfman and Ana Maria Mendoza, interleaved with passages of Latin liturgy. The other pieces are mostly relatively restrained settings of religious texts composed for specific events or places, but there are two secular songs by Robert Burns: So Deep is an arrangement of Burns’s own tune to his poem ‘O My Luve’s Like a Red, Red Rose’, while in The Gallant Weaver MacMillan substitutes a new melody. These pieces show his music at its most gentle, intimate and accommodating.

The most recent work is Tremunt videntes angeli (2002), commissioned for the dedication of a window designed by Eduardo Paolozzi for St Mary’s Cathedral, Edinburgh. Subtle, disciplined and radiant, it is one of several tracks which exploit the delicacy and clarity of the Elysian Singers to impressive effect. In contrast, Cantos Sagrados itself, where fear, horror and anger mingle with sorrow, hope and the impulse towards reconciliation, allows them to display a fiercer aspect. It was first recorded in 1994 by Polyphony and Christopher Bowers-Broadbent under MacMillan’s direction. That recording, on Catalyst, has now vanished from the catalogue, excellent though it was. The current absence of alternative recordings of most of these pieces makes this album even more worthy of recommendation.