Both as composer and conductor, Ronald Corp is steeped in the English choral tradition, and in A Spotless Rose he has traversed by his own path the hallowed ground of words immortalised by Herbert Howells.

Corp’s own music, chordal yet contrapuntal, and likewise redolent in its modality of a distant past ‘of ancient seers’ foreshowing’, flows smoothly in flexible rhythm, each voice a shapely strophic melody. Mindful of the famous close of Howells’s setting, Corp concludes with an exquisite e...