This radiant new Palestrina recital from the Greenwich Village-based Choir of St Luke in the Fields commands tonal beauty and emotional flow that has a personal feel. This may be because the context in which Palestrina wrote his hundreds of Masses and motets still exists today: a need for timeless music that shines light upon the soul, as human blueprints are turned miraculously into sanctified sound.

Led by David Shuler, director of music and organist at St Luke’s since 1988, the 14-member choir move naturally with a pleasant dynamic range and a gentle colour palette. The waves of music they produce sound like they were designed to be performed for papal audiences in St Peter’s. These performances are concerned more with the warmth of human dialogue – with blending lines rather than maintaining their integrity – and less with achieving spiritual purity by being historically rigorous. I wonder which approach would have been more likely to persuade Cardinal Borromeo that Palestrina’s music belonged in the church.

The warm, spacious recordings – made not at St Luke’s in the West Village but at the Church of St Mary the Virgin in midtown Manhattan – provide an audiophile display of Palestrina’s vivid writing. The blending of the voices halfway through Tu es Petrus is quite astonishing. In Sicut cervus, as the choir relaxes into deeper regions of sound and dimension, the microphones capture the women with an especially lovely bloom.

John Bradley’s beautifully written booklet notes reminds us further that this music was at the service of words that were meant for listeners to reflect on.