What perfect timing. Just weeks after the announcement that, from 2022, girls and women will be included alongside boys and men in the choir of St John’s College, Cambridge – the first of the Oxbridge ‘big five’ choirs to do so – the group release a recording that, from its title right through repertoire, participants and composers, is a celebration of the institution’s living and ever-growing tradition.

The same spirit of generosity, of flinging wide the doors and welcoming everyone in, that seems to have guided that surely era-defining decision shapes an album that looks to both past and future. Director of music Andrew Nethsingha shares conducting duties with his predecessors Christopher Robinson and David Hill, whose 85th and 65th birthdays the recording marks. Hill’s Yale Schola Cantorum also make a cameo appearance, as do former members and friends of the choir, whose massed forces help create some spectacular sounds. Stretch a point and those former friends also include composers Herbert Howells and Jonathan Harvey – a rich legacy indeed – and George Guest isn’t left out either, commemorated in the full-blooded account of Love divine, all loves excelling (complete with Robinson descant) that closes the disc.

The programme is structured with all Nethsingha’s habitual care, growing organically outwards from the single line of Hildegard of Bingen’s O pastor animarum (gracefully shaped by trebles, its unison arcs echoed and warmed in Howells’s A Hymn for St Cecilia and again in the delicacy of ‘He delivered the poor’ from Parry’s cantata-in-miniature Hear my words, ye people) until we arrive at the Parry with a full cast of extras.

The St John’s sound is showcased in all its flexibility, from sinewy directness in James Long’s arresting Sicut aquilae, where the choir must match the forthright quality of Jack Ross’s solo trumpet, to a shimmering miasma in Jonathan Harvey’s The Tree. All but one of the tracks was recorded live in college services, and the occasional rustle or thump of the congregation (particularly evocative as they kneel in prayer during the Howells Responses) only adds to the atmosphere of a recording whose music is absolutely embedded in functional, everyday liturgical life.

At a time when so many church and cathedral choirs are under threat, it’s a poignant and all too necessary reminder of a tradition whose value doesn’t lie in continuity for its own sake but in growth and evolution.