Jesus College, Cambridge, has ‘choirs’ rather than a choir: the all-male Chapel Choir with its boy trebles, the mixed College Choir, and a Combined Choir that brings both groups together. ‘My Beloved’s Voice’ features all three, taking advantage of three subtly different sonorities to explore repertoire that ranges from Renaissance polyphony to violet-scented Victoriana and contemporary works.

Running as a connecting thread through this wide-ranging music is the Song of Solomon with its fecund imagery of fruits and vines, and ecstatic portraits of the poet’s beloved. It’s a text that has prompted even the most severe of composers to purple polyphony, and the danger in a collection like this is that it becomes over-rich, lacking the dramatic variety of a satisfying programme.

The disc unfolds, however, in ebbing arcs of emotion, the rougher simplicity of boys’ voices cutting the cloying sweetness of Casals’s frankly sentimental Nigra sum, while the adult voices of the College Choir risk a hazily exquisite blend for Clemens’s Ego flos campi and find particular richness for Howard Skempton’s Rise up my love. The four anthems by Skempton are a particular highlight, setting text with an evocative sensitivity, delicately handled.

Although there are some choral monuments on the disc (Durufle’s Ubi caritas; Walton’s ubiquitous wedding anthem Set me as a seal), for the most part the path is one less-travelled, wending its way past comparative rarities such as Finzi’s My lovely one, Brumel’s Sicut lilium and Grieg’s How fair is thy face, that all add up to a disc whose love songs are as fresh and lovely as their texts.