This is ravishing…Webber and the Choir of Gonville & Caius, Cambridge, shimmer and scintillate in conveying Anderson’s broad musical and emotional palette. It is clear that all involved have the kind of deep familiarity with these pieces that enables a sense of freshness and spontaneity, captured marvellously by Delphian in the beautiful acoustic of the chapel at Merton College, Oxford…The disc as a whole is a feast for the ears.

The Gonville & Caius choir has worked with this material for two years under Geoffrey Webber, performing some of the material at Evensong and in concert, to the point where it sounds like their natural language; not ‘effortless’, but not effortful, either – just very lovely and accurate singing.

Anderson gives full weight to the sense of wonder that religious beliefs can inspire…Sung by an outstanding Cambridge choir (with female rather than boys voices) and sensitively recorded in an Oxford chapel, the result is tremendously rewarding…The music is never more arresting than when imaginatively exploiting distinctions between the community – the choir as a collective entity – and individual solo voices, or when evoking bell-like resonance to maximum dramatic effect.

Bell Mass, a five-part “missa brevis” composed for Westminster Abbey, and an acoustically self-aware essay like so many by Anderson, builds the resonance of the cathedral’s bells into the texture in precise detail, to rich effect. O Sing unto the Lord, a psalm setting, was written for Westminster Cathedral, for St Cecilia’s Day. I Saw Eternity, to a tiny slice of a Henry Vaughan poem, is five minutes of rapture.