This recording surveys Cecilia McDowall’s substantial choral output, most of it written in the past two decades. She could scarcely have a better group to sing it than Stephen Layton’s Trinity College Choir.

Trinity College Choir has long been one of the true jewels of the British choral scene, and this album might just be its greatest. The singing is basically perfect in terms of intonation, blend, tone, balance, control, and technique. This is music-making on an exalted level.

It’s a typically meticulous recording by Layton and The Choir of Trinity College Cambridge, sensitive to every nuance of phrasing and articulation – a glossy account of a sequence of well-crafted anthems, with a bonus in the form of Alexander Hamilton’s account of McDowall’s O Antiphons for solo organ.

Released to mark McDowall’s seventieth birthday, this beautifully-sung collection of sacred choral works bears witness to her imaginative (and always superbly intelligible) setting of texts and accessible but never derivative musical language; highlights include a luminous setting of the executed British nurse Edith Cavell’s final words in Standing as I do before God, and the exuberant Regina Caeli (2005).