Having some years ago given us a pair of Masses from Mozart’s Salzburg years (4/13), the choir of St Albans Cathedral turn now to his older colleague, Michael Haydn. The organist on the earlier recording, Tom Winpenny, steps up to assume Andrew Lucas’s directorial position.

Listeners familiar with Mozart’s Salzburg sacred music will not be surprised by the style of his elder contemporary: declamatory choral writing and economical word-setting accompanied by restless violins in faster music, and no shortage of lyricism when the texts veer towards the tender. The difference is that the works here are scored only for upper voices.

Michael Haydn devoted much time and music to the Feast of the Holy Innocents (December 28), perhaps due to the death of his only child, Aloysia Josepha, before her first birthday. The gentle offertory Anima nostra sets the Proper text of the day, while the Vespers were compiled by Haydn’s collaborator and copyist Nikolaus Lang; both works would have been performed by the trebles of the cathedral choir, with one of the boys taking on the duties of the bishop – a tradition that continued from medieval times.

The Mass, on the other hand, was composed for the Augustinian monastery of Mülln, to the north of the city. St Nicholas of Tolentino was a 13th-century Italian mystic, the first Augustinian friar to be canonised, noted for miracles linked to the rescue and resuscitation of children. Haydn deploys the choral voices in unison with a pair of soprano soloists in music of graceful charm, perhaps taken a little carefully but accompanied vividly by the one-to-a-part strings and trumpets of the Lawes Baroque Players.