There’s a moment of provocative, eye-meeting loveliness on this recording from Ralph Allwood’s Rodolfus Choir that singlehandedly makes the case against the increasing digital fragmentation of our listening – cherry-picking a track here, a track there. Tallis’s exquisite hymn Thou wast, O God (best known as the theme for Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis) concludes in sober homophony – low, intimate, inward. Barely has its final chord finished before the brilliance of Gabriel Jackson’s To Morning bursts into the ears, giddy with radiance, ecstatic as Blake’s text. It’s artful programming that hits its emotional mark with artless directness.

Six hundred years of choral music from across Europe – works by Victoria, Tallis and Bach to Jackson, Kodály and Tavener – is united here by ideas of time. The inevitability of death and the fragility of life (Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ sits centrally, in a contemporary setting by Thomas Recknell) jostle with music’s own temporal power for top billing, and if some works strive harder than others to fit under Allwood’s thematic umbrella, it’s all in a good cause.

The fresh, unforced quality of these young singers brings a pleasant friction to grave-facing works like Gibbons’s What is our life? and Howells’s Even such is time, and comes into its own in the soft-focus sentimentality of Parry’s Music, when soft voices die. Rooted in a warmly present bass section, the choral blend is always thoughtfully calibrated, and the Tallis Thou wast is a marked improvement on the choir’s previous recording – distilled down to a more focused tone and intensity.

Just two issues keep this album behind comparable collections from The Sixteen, the Cambridge Singers and King’s College, Cambridge. Too much warmth creeps into Arvo Pärt’s Nunc dimittis and …which was the son of…, denying the music the chilly restraint it paradoxically needs to flourish, and the choice of the ‘Et incarnatus est’ from Bach’s B minor Mass as a final track is a misstep – a mongrel addition too far for a collection whose music is divided by more than it is united