With their latest disc, The Choir of Royal Holloway and Music Director Rupert Gough ensure that Oxbridge ensembles don’t have it all their own way when it comes to great university choirs. Gough’s projects are reliably interesting and this latest – a collection of 20th- and 21st-century British anthems dedicated to St Cecilia – is no different.

Of course, Britten’s extraordinary setting of Auden is at the heart of the disc, but surrounded by much less familiar works, including two premiere recordings. James MacMillan’s Cecilia virgo has all the makings of a modern classic, opening in clouds of cluster-chords and neo-Renaissance textures. Here, the cori spezzati of the Gabrielis are viewed through a contemporary lens, softening and dissolving the edges of the counterpoint. Gabriel Jackson’s La musique sets Elizabeth Bishop’s heady verse with graceful lyricism. Unfortunately here, Felicity Lott’s solo line seems to come from another world to the still, blended choral textures beneath, jangling intrusively in the ear.

If the handful of soprano solos spread across the disc are anything to go by, Gough has an exceptional group of singers here. They are impressively responsive, shifting from the rich homophony of Howells’s A Hymn for St Cecilia (anchored always in the bass), to the fidgety contrapuntal writing of Britten’s ‘I have no shadow’ episode and embracing the bluesy harmonies of Richard Rodney Bennett’s Verses on St Cecilia’s Day. Only Elgar’s There is sweet music could do with a little more flexibility in the tempi, a little less matter-of-factness tempering its unembarrassed sentimentality.