The Choir of Wells Cathedral lives up to its reputation as Britain’s best cathedral choir (see Gramophone, 1/11) in this 30‑year survey of James MacMillan’s smaller-scale sacred music. As The Lamb has come for us from the House of David (1979) shows, even as a 20‑year-old student he had an assurance and a forthrightness fitting for what MacMillan himself calls an “apologist for Catholicism” and the Wells sound, recorded with appropriate spaciousness but without excessive resonance, easily rises above occasional suggestions of Anglican gentility.

The two most recent pieces, Jubilate Deo and Serenity (both 2009) demonstrate MacMillan’s skilful blending of those aspects of modern mainstream musical styles – more of Messiaen or Britten than of Ligeti or Maxwell Davies – which underpin the unapologetic accessibility of his choral writing. But the extended motet …here in hiding…, written for the solo quartet of the Hilliard Ensemble, has an extra vividness and a touch of raw primitiveness that seems so much more compelling in a religious context than the triumphalist tone breaking through here and there, as in the brazen Gloria of the Magnificat and Nunc dimittis– though (fortunately) brazenness is starkly opposed in the end by hushed reticence.

The only possible miscalculation is using a brave solo treble for the 1984 setting of Khalil Gibran’s On Love, where more operatic tones, whether male or female, would surely be preferable. But all credit to choir director Matthew Owens and organist Jonathan Vaughn, the latter proving in a well-calculated reading of Le tombeau de Georges Rouault that MacMillan in questing mode is far superior to MacMillan the barnstormer.