The Crouch End Festival Chorus’s latest release focuses on rarely performed music by Felix Mendelssohn and his older sister, Fanny, and what a fascinating programme this is.

The album opens with two works composed in 1831. Felix’s chorale cantata Vom Himmel hoch is a robust, quasi-Baroque effusion of 14 minutes, tempered with limpid Romantic tenderness in the soprano aria ‘Sei willekomm, du edler Gast’, sung with crystal eloquence by Julia Doyle. In 1829 Fanny Mendelssohn married the artist Wilhelm Hensel. Their only child, Sebastian, was born the following year. For his first birthday Fanny composed a cantata for chorus and orchestra entitled Hiob (‘Job’). Lasting 11 and a half minutes, it reveals the depth of her own study of JS Bach.

Her six Gartenlieder, Op 3 of 1846, should be taken up by more of our crack chamber choirs. What beauties they are! The Crouch End sopranos are put to the test by both the high tessitura and agile turns of phrase, particularly in the second song, ‘Schöne Fremde’, and pass with flying colours. The fifth song, ‘Abendlich schon rauscht der Wald’, is the real gem here with its wider emotional range and deceptive subtleties.

Felix’s Die erste Walpurgisnacht was a stalwart of Victorian choral societies but seems to have withered in popularity in recent decades. This dramatic ballad on a poem by Goethe requires a large, powerful chorus and a quartet of operatically inclined soloists. Berlioz was present at the Leipzig premiere and praised ‘the whirling momentum and sweep of the whole’. David Temple really has the measure of this high-octane music, his approach confident yet persuasive, refined yet incisive. The chorus convey perfectly the textual inflections, with authentic German diction. Ashley Riches’s characterisation is faultless. The London Mozart Players are superb.

There’s a wonderful breadth to the sound caught in St Jude-on-the-Hill in Hampstead Garden Suburb by the Chandos team. This new recording is surely the new benchmark.