Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge/Stephen Layton Hyperion CDA 67832***

A bookish friend once told me of her dismay on discovering that most of the shops advertising books in London’s Soho weren’t just bookshops. Stephen Layton’s beautifully sung new collection of unaccompanied American choral music has a similarly narrow perspective, albeit a softcore one. The style is what in musical terms you might call neocon, harking back to harmonic certainties of yore, but with a dash of gentle spicing to make it sound up-to-date. There’s also a strand running through the collection, as if some of the composers were engaged in a competition to outdo the high-lying soprano solos of Allegri’s Miserere. The composers represented are René Clausen, Steven Stucky, Ola Gjeilo, Frank Ferro, Edwin Fissinger, Stephen Pauls, William Hawley and, best of all, Healey Willan, the only one actually born in the 19th century. See url.ie/4qdb