Between them, England’s cathedral choirs and Oxbridge choral foundations have an effective monopoly on polyphony with trebles on the top line. So it’s lovely to hear from another institution. The London Oratory Schola Cantorum and their music director Charles Cole launch a new relationship with Hyperion with two releases: ‘Sacred Treasures of Christmas’ and ‘Sacred Treasures of Spain’.

The series began back in 2017 on Sony with a collection of English works but now gains pace with this double release that continues the choir’s geographic tour through the motet repertoire, while also diverging for a Christmas album drawing on music from right across Europe. This Christmas album (recorded two and a half years later) is the standout, the choral sound markedly more focused, the music delivered with greater confidence and variety.

The Schola may be the Brompton Oratory’s parish choir but they are also a school ensemble whose back lines are made up of boys aged 18 and under, with the support of just six adult lay clerks. The effect is impressively mature and well blended, the bright, sweet top-line sound balanced to and shaped by the lighter lower voices. You can hear their flexibility in the contrast between Scheidt’s Puer natus in Bethlehem and Sweelinck’s double-choir Hodie Christus natus est, the disc’s arresting opener – all fizz and crisp, forward delivery – and Mouton’s Nesciens mater, its cloudy skeins of counterpoint drifting in the air like incense, the trebles softening the edges of their sound, allowing much more breath to flow through it.

This latter mode seems to be the favourite, the sound deployed elsewhere to great effect in Giovanni Gabrieli’s O magnum mysterium, Nanino’s too little-heard Diffusa est gratia and the delicate, lace-like tracery of Victoria’s Alma redemptoris mater. It becomes a bit of a default however in the Spanish album, where you long for just a little more contrast, a little more responsiveness to the variety and range of repertoire collected here.

While the Schola Cantorum are at home in the softer draping of Guerrero’s counterpoint, revelling in the gentle sensuality of his Ave virgo sanctissima and his lyrical O sacrum convivium, they’re less at home in the bolder, more architectural lines of Morales’s pentitenial Peccantem me quotidie or the richer, more declarative certainty of Victoria’s Ave Maria a 8, where we lose both body in the tone and direction in the pacing – the triple-time dance of the ‘ora pro nobis’ all but imperceptible. Slower speeds may be necessary in the choir’s home acoustic but simply aren’t sustainable here in Holborn’s St Alban’s Church. Lobo’s Versa est in luctum also lacks forward movement, resulting in a slight sagging of the top line.

The choir has obviously grown and developed since 2017, and if the Christmas collection is typical of things to come, this should be an interesting project to keep an eye on.