Jonathan Harvey was the focus of Martyn Brabbins’ programme with the BBC Singers. Four years after Harvey’s death, it provided a timely reminder of what an outstanding choral composer he was, who invariably managed to say something fresh and deeply personal, whether writing pieces still unmistakably rooted in the Anglican choral tradition, or exploring other faiths in works that made use of the latest musical technology.

The centrepiece was the unaccompanied Forms of Emptiness, from 1986, a timelessly beautiful mix of extracts from the Heart Sutra and poems by EE Cummings that embraces several distinct musical and spiritual traditions simultaneously, whereas more modest works such as the early I Love the Lord and the very late setting of Edwin Muir’s The Annunciation both seem to look back to the church music with which Harvey grew up. But there were reminders of his pre-eminence as an electro-acoustic composer too, with his 1980 tape classic, Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco, and the richly inventive Other Presences, for trumpet and electronics, in which Marco Blaauw’s playing was confronted by multiple digital reflections of itself.

There was music by others too – Britten’s A.M.D.G., his rather uneven collection of settings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and a premiere from the Flemish composer Wim Henderickx, Blossomings, commissioned as a tribute to Harvey. The settings of Buddhist, Christian and Islamic texts are given a numinous electronic background and punctuated with trumpet solos; there are some enticing sounds but also too many cliched ones, though Brabbins and the BBC Singers devoted as much care to them as they did to Harvey’s rewarding choral textures.