If the master of the Queen’s music is, in effect, the UK’s official composer for the public sphere, it seems fitting that the post is currently held by someone so adept at writing for choirs. The BBC Singers offer a cross-section of Judith Weir’s choral output, under conductor David Hill. We start in the cathedral, with the densely spiralling alleluias of Weir’s mesmerisingly beautiful millennium anthem, All the Ends of the Earth. The simpler textures of her Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis occasionally find the choir sounding harsh up high, but theirs is a vibrant sound, never bland. It invigorates the leaner textures of those pieces as much as it does the denser ones of works including Storm, a five-movement-setting of words from The Tempest, and the Missa del Cid – not really a mass at all, but a quirky, partly narrated account of a swashbuckling 11th-century Spanish hero defeating the Moorish forces.
