To record one volume of Anglican canticles may be regarded as a misfortune. To record three (four, once the series is complete) looks like carelessness … There’s a tendency to dismiss this music as the bread and butter of liturgical life: good enough for everyday, but not for special occasions. Andrew Nethsingha and The Choir of St John’s Cambridge continue to prove this spectacularly wrong in ‘Magnificat 3’ – musical jam all the way.

Any sense of this as a catalogue of works rather than a recital falls away in Nethsingha’s careful segues, programming that makes each disc a satisfying listening sequence. The conductor isn’t above playing games with the listener, opening this latest volume not in England (or Anglicanism) at all but Russia, with the Orthodox solemnity of Chesnokov’s Nunc dimittis. Bass soloist Thomas Butler (I suspect opera-goers are going to hear a lot more of him) rides hazy, smoky waves of choral incense, which eventually coalesce into Howells’s St Paul’s Service – the same spiritual urge translated across cultures. By the time the trebles are shooting skywards for ‘world without end’ we’re fully corporeal, sound made flesh.

A sense of place emerges keenly in the contrast between Howells’s St Paul’s and the more introverted Westminster Service: lean and tautly anxious here, with some deliciously nasal doubt from the organ in the Nunc. Then there are the links of lineage: Stanford giving way to his student Howells, passing the baton in turn to Bryan Kelly, whose Brittenishly syncopated Magnificat and Nunc dimittis in C sends us off in rollicking style. (Nethsingha’s booklet essay – worth the price of the disc by itself – quotes a droll Howells on the work: ‘After each performance the church will have to be re-consecrated!’) Balancing out the extroversion of Stanford and Howells is the crystalline precision of Philip Moore’s Sancti Johannis Cantabrigiense – a verse-anthem by Byrd or Gibbons that has strayed into another age, echoing pairs of solo voices and lulling organ accompaniment supplying the intimate heart of this recording.

The choir inflect works spanning a world-changing few decades, from the First World War to the 1960s, with distinct personality while maintaining a core sound that’s always free and full, refreshingly natural (if trebles naturally phrased with this level of taste and care). It’s sad that Nethsingha’s departure means that the next volume will be the last. I can’t think of a greater or more apt epitaph to the music director’s time at St John’s.