During the past 17 years Stephen Layton has nurtured the chapel choir of Trinity College Cambridge into arguably the pre-eminent mixed-voice vocal ensemble in the British Isles. At the end of the 2023 academic year he leaves Cambridge to pursue his international conducting career. Fortunately, he leaves Hyperion with a legacy of new recordings. This first volume of eight anthems, recorded in January 2022 in Ely Cathedral, features a wide variety of repertoire spanning 1833-2016, a deeply satisfying mixture of the familiar and under-represented modern masterpieces.

Elgar’s brooding Great is the Lord sets the tone with a vibrant choral blend and effortlessly smooth transitions in this festal multisectional work. Give unto the Lord is equally muscular and sweeping. In between the Elgar items, SS Wesley’s The Wilderness receives the finest recorded performance I have yet encountered. The build-up to the end of the mighty fugue is totally shattering, the perfect foil to the concluding floating five-part ‘verse’. A slight regret is that these three ‘classics’ haven’t also been recorded in their orchestral guises. However, it is worth buying this disc just to hear the magnificent voice of bass soloist Florian Störtz, winner of the 2023 International Handel Singing Competition.

The rest of the programme runs mostly in chronological order. Howells’s ruminative The House of the Mind is treated with deep care and tenderness. Come out, Lazar by Howells’s pupil Paul Spicer is much spicier and more outwardly dramatic fare. Daniel Atkinson makes an eloquent job of the tenor solo. Most beautiful and hauntingly memorable of all is Patrick Gowers’s Viri Galilaei for two choirs and two organs, a little-known aspect of his oeuvre. James MacMillan’s O give thanks unto the Lord features a spectacularly virtuosic organ part, played with apparent ease by Jonathan Lee. In fact, the Ely organ has never sounded finer under the control of Lee and his fellow organ scholar Harrison Cole, who plays the only non-choral track on the album, Francis Pott’s energetic Toccata (1991).

The final track, David Bednall’s Siegfried Sassoon setting Everyone sang, sums up the essence of this album: ecstatic dynamic singing with sensitive, orchestrally coloured accompaniments and an unerring sense of architectural balance, aided by David Hinitt’s superb engineering, which allows every detail of Ely’s cavernous acoustic to be heard. I cannot wait to hear Vol 2.