If you look back through the Gabrieli Consort’s discography you can see a new trend emerging. Among the large-scale works for choir and orchestra – the Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Monteverdi, Bach – are increasingly scattered discs of miniatures from the English choral tradition. Up until now these have been consistently sacred, but this new recording, ‘Silence & Music’, takes the ensemble’s first steps into secular repertoire in music by Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Warlock, Grainger and more.

In doing so, McCreesh is walking in good company. Tenebrae (Bene Arte/Signum, 10/16) and The Sixteen (Coro, 11/15) have both recently released albums of similar works, suggesting that the part-song might finally be throwing off its unfashionable reputation as the poor cousin of the anthem.

There are some interesting comparisons. Stanford’s The Blue Bird (its top line taken, in both cases, by full sopranos) sets Tenebrae’s heat-haze warmth and blowsy loveliness against the chaste control and immaculate beauty of the Gabrielis. James MacMillan’s The Gallant Weaver, with its delicate overlapping strands of upper voices, similarly gives us cool restraint and wide-shot distance from McCreesh and his forces compared to the more textured immediacy of The Sixteen.

Preference will be down to individual taste but with such highly perfumed music there’s much to be said for performances that keep things clean, understated. The musical care and the easy, unforced shaping of lines from the Gabrielis is all the ornament works like Elgar’s There is sweet music and Howells’s The summer is coming need, and the two Vaughan Williams settings – Silence and Music and the expansive Rest – sit just the right side of sentimentality.

Careful programming offsets so much sweetness with the astringent virtuosity of Jonathan Dove’s Who killed Cock Robin? (thrillingly and wittily dramatised here) and the bizarre, near-Gothic excess of Grainger’s arrangement of The Three Ravens, complete with lugubrious harmonium. The result is a clever mixture of moods – a disc that takes the part-song into the 21st century not only in repertoire but also in style.