Some 75 years after his first involvement with church music at the Diocesan College in Rondebosch, South Africa, John Joubert began a relationship with Wells Cathedral which yielded first the Missa Wellensis (2013) and later the St Mark Passion (2015), both recorded by the cathedral’s choir. Joubert’s music never fails to amplify his text and if that is more apparent in the dramatic Passion setting, it is no less true in his Mass, where chromatic shuffles in the Kyrie and creeping harmonic movements in the Sanctus enliven the sentiments of these prayers as much as the composer’s famous rhythmic impetus does in other works. Only in Joubert’s fugues (on ‘Pleni sunt coeli’ and ‘Dona nobis pacem’) does he feel a little ill at ease.

The Passion is a highly resonant piece, which is largely down to Joubert’s simple but astute decisions concerning scoring: a solo cello weaves its way through the piece with ‘angry tremolandi, resonant pizzicato chords, singing reflections and commentaries’ (to borrow Christopher Morley’s booklet description), while the organ laments, rumbles or roars – accompanying both the crowd outbursts and the gorgeously arranged hymns that close each of the five movements.

There is control, pace, an appropriate balance of drama with devotion and the feeling that the whole breathes, not least as the culmination is left to the organ alone (David Bednall gets the most from a sometimes unsympathetic instrument). The vocal soloists sound fine, but as on ‘A Wells Christmas’ (12/16) we hear bizarrely over-egged final-consonant diction from the choristers (‘prince of glory dieder’ / ‘pour contempt on all my prider’). Other than that, the girls and boys sound heavenly. I only wish – particularly in the glowing Locus iste – that the men sang with as much discipline of dynamic, blend and phrase control.