This is an exquisite performance of the Duruflé Requiem, beautifully evoking the inherent intimacy of the version with chamber orchestra and organ accompaniment, yet wielding great power at the climaxes, where the weight of the Westminster Abbey organ comes into its own. The playing of the Britten Sinfonia is superb, Robert Quinney’s fluid, immensely colourful organ-playing a joy to behold and Roderick Williams a supremely compelling baritone soloist. The Abbey Choir boys occasionally sound pressured (as in their exposed divided ‘Christe eleison’) but for the most part this singing is simply divine, and James O’Donnell moulds and shapes every moment with infinite care, the chant-infused lines dovetailing impeccably. It sounds unequivocally English (no harm in that) and lacks the intensity of Matthew Best’s Corydon Singers – whose recording, now almost 30 years old, still reigns supreme in the available versions of Duruflé’s third and, to my way of thinking, most successful version of this oft-recorded work – but as a beautiful listening experience it is in a class of its own.

Loosely connected by commemorations marking the centenary of the First World War and 75th anniversary of the Second, the programme seems a bit of a hotchpotch; and, recorded in two different locations on several different occasions, there is a certain unevenness about the disc as a whole. The choir is at its very best in the unaccompanied works (recorded in the headier environment of St Alban’s Church, Holborn), relishing the rhythmic and harmonic immediacy of Philip Moore’s three unaccompanied Prayers and the lush, luminous textures of Herbert Howells’s moving tribute to President Kennedy.

The spacious acoustic of Westminster Abbey certainly comes to the rescue of Vaughan Williams’s rambling arrangement of the hymn tune St Anne, and it swarms around the ethereal harmonies of Tavener’s powerfully atmospheric setting of words from St Paul, gracefully swallowing up the choir’s extended final syllable to close the disc with a pretty convincing vision of eternity.