Judith Bingham’s isn’t a comfortable sound world. If there is redemptive hope to be found in her choral music, it grows out of musical doubt, eschewing evangelical harmonic simplicity for a more rugged Anglicanism. This excellent disc from Wells Cathedral Choir and their boy choristers looks back over 15 years of Bingham’s choral works, from the delicate ambiguity of the newly revised Jesum quaeritis Nazarenum to the more forthright ‘alternative canticles’ of the Wells Service.

There’s a frankness to the Wells choral sound that suits music that has nothing precious or twee about it. It creates an underlying muscularity, even in the glowing cluster-chords of the ‘Cantate Domino’, and foregrounds the texts that Bingham sets with Britten-like care. Harvest, a setting of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘Hurrahing in Harvest’, manages to compress the vast scope of the poet’s emotional narrative into a concise anthem, moving from hazy, lazy heat to an ecstatic close that matches the verse for intensity. Blake gets altogether darker treatment, and The Shepherd pulses with unexpected rhythmic interest. Fretful and anxious, Bingham anticipates the limitations of this idyllic scene, energising the text with rhythmic challenge and harmonic contradictions.

Bingham’s vocal writing hasn’t been well served on disc, and this collection is the most representative yet of the composer’s functional, liturgical works. It is both contrast and complement to the BBC Singers’ 2008 ‘Remoter Worlds’, featuring Bingham’s secular settings (Signum, 3/09). The use of a cathedral choir of men and boys (with a guest appearance from the cathedral’s girls’ choir on the final track) rather than a chamber choir helps anchor this music in the Anglican cathedral tradition to which Bingham’s music so consciously belongs.