The combination of small-scale choir and saxophone quartet is a surprising one, though it would take a particularly crabbed purist not to deny its effectiveness. I might have fallen into that category had I not been sent this to review; or perhaps I still do … but still find myself won over.

It’s uncanny how credibly the saxophone can be made to sound like other instruments: on the opening track, Schütz’s Ich weiss, dass mein Erlöser lebt, sackbuts and cornets; and in Bach’s ‘Zion hört’ (from Wachet auf), a top line that sounds not unlike a French horn. Gabrieli’s antiphonal O magnum mysterium makes the most of the combination’s potential. To my ear, the acoustic is a touch top-heavy, but the basses still have plenty of presence.

It’s an imaginative programme, too, blending the Renaissance and Baroque and new works that reference early polyphony in different ways. I could have done without the selections from ‘the Great Bach’, which have appeared on so many ‘classical hits’ albums that they do this anthology’s altogether more questing spirit a disservice. Best to focus on Schütz, whose music furnishes the recital’s structural backbone. The saxophone quartet is so integrated within the choir that disbelief is easily suspended, and the choir itself sounds particularly confident and sure-footed; whereas in the Bach, the instrumental parts’ virtuoso character brings them to the fore, so that they sound like … saxophones. (That’s fine, of course, provided you’re entirely accepting of the premise.)

The contemporary pieces are also less satisfying, to my ear anyway: the tuning in MacMillan’s Christus vincit comes unstuck about a minute in. The most successful offering is Roderick Williams’s reworking of Byrd’s Ave verum corpus, which weaves the original’s motifs and harmonies into a ‘hyper-tonal’, deliberately over-exposed tonal language – though as so often in music of this sort, the final tonal cadence fails to impart a sense of finality. Another offering in the same vein is Owain Park’s elaboration of Allegri’s Miserere, which treats its source material rather literally and is harmonically less enterprising. Sarah Rimkus’s Mater Dei, a modern-day antiphon based on the Marian chants, builds to an effective climax, but is immediately followed by Bach’s ‘Jesu bleibet meine Freude’ (or ‘Jesu, joy of man’s desiring’, if you prefer), a juxtaposition that does justice to neither.