Edmund Jolliffe has a longstanding relationship with the Nonsuch Singers, for whom he has written a number of settings, not least his 2018 Sleep Cycle. Opening this selection of works, the first album solely devoted to Jolliffe’s music, are his setting of Lux Aeterna, the Roman Catholic Communion antiphon, and a number of carols.

This is certainly work calculated to transport, the Lux Aeterna exquisitely consolatory, the O Nata lux suffused with light, its setting entirely homophonic. The carols range from There is no Rose, directly inspired, Jolliffe says, by Britten’s version – which is heard in the intoning of the Latin, so familiar from Britten’s setting in the Ceremony of Carols – and yet holding its own path, sung beautifully here as elsewhere by the Nonsuch under Tom Bullard.

The Emily Dickinson poem Abraham provides somewhat darker subject matter for a carol, but displays Jolliffe’s ability to shape a narrative arc, with its repeated ‘Abrahams’ building and fading towards the close.

Jolliffe’s punningly-named Sleep Cycle takes seven disparate poems, from Shakespeare to Rossetti, to fit each phase of the sleep cycle as we know it. The opening ‘Be not afeard’ – from The Tempest – is upbeat, but we gradually slide into sleep via Byron, with stops for Coleridge’s ‘What if you slept? – the transitory, bright, repetitive fourth phase dominating this brief midnight snippet – before landing come morning with a galloping setting of Ben Johnson’s Hymn to Diana, a choral alarm clock for the new day.