In an era of chunk able, bitesize, hyperlinked, free-associative streaming, it’s lovely to come across a proper recital. The individual tracks on ‘Traces’ – the fifth album from London-based Sansara and their founder-director Tom Herring – are impeccable: these are top-notch choral performances. But that sort of goes without saying in today’s over-abundant British choral market.

What sets it apart are not only some unusual repertoire choices but also the dialogues, musical, textual and thematic, that run through it. This isn’t just another ‘pieces we like about night’ job. Ethel Smyth’s unexpectedly knotty Komm, süsser Tod – a piece that we should definitely be hearing more of – grows directly out of Brahms’s ‘Warum ist das licht gegeben?’, a musical chain of influence and evolution experienced in real time. A central sequence of contemporary works offers a chance for the ear to reset and refresh between the two framing panels of German Romantics and their heirs. The programme’s origins are in an Oxford University research initiative focused on the White Rose resistance movement of the Second World War: five students and a professor at the University of Munich who opposed the Nazi regime, and were executed as a result.

While German and British repertoire dominates, the programme embodies resistance in broader ways. Connections are drawn with anti-Semitism, for example, in a stonking premiere recording of German-born Israeli composer Paul Ben Haim’s Psalm 126 – an ambitious setting for eight-part male voices full of extravagant effects (though it’s hard to get a feel for the composer’s signature among so much variety). And the central theme is brought keenly up to date in Ukrainian composer Natalia Tsupryk’s poignant A Quiet Night. Commissioned by Sansara in 2022, it’s a piece of understated endurance. Pedal points hold us suspended, while liturgical-style chant looks back and forwards through time.

It’s lovely to see British composer Philip Moore enjoying some attention across various releases currently. Here we get his typically distilled Three Prayers of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: three movements that paint prayer in its many moods, from anguished distress to quiet certainty. There’s no spare flesh on the elegant musical bones, which seem to glow under such careful choral handling.

These are beautifully shaped accounts, a finely calibrated balance of tonal soft and hard, melt and attack.