John Stainer made it his life’s work to reform and renew the standards of music in schools, parish churches, colleges and cathedrals up and down the land. His two most lasting legacies are our thriving cathedral choral tradition and this piece – The Crucifixion.Intended to be accessible, and full of the zeal and emotion of the reforming High Church, Stainer’s meditation on the Passion was immediately taken up in both Britain and America, and is as popular today as ever.Here, Duncan Ferguson and the Choir of St Mary’s Cathedral, Edinburgh are joined by two rising-star Scottish soloists and, in the hymns, by a nave-full of local young musicians and the cathedral’s own worshippers to create a true sense of the musical community spirit that the composer had in mind.

Hearing guitarist Sean Shibe’s Bach recital, recorded in Delphian’s fifteenth-century Scottish venue, Baroque violinist Bojan Čičić was inspired during the first lockdown to begin recording Bach’s iconic Partitas and Sonatas. Amid the gloom of the pandemic and restrictions on performances, Čičić travelled north – when allowed – to explore the intense rigours of Bach’s fugues and shining virtuosity of the Partitas’ fast movements.Dedicated to his late violin professor and with a booklet essay written by Mahan Esfahani, for Bojan Čičić the making of this recording in the snowbound Scottish countryside has been his greatest career highlight – a journey for him from darkness into light.

The everyday is transfigured in this intimate collection of chamber music and songs by leading young Scottish composer Martin Suckling – settings for mezzo-soprano and piano of five magical, moonlit poems by Michael Donaghy and a String Quintet written in collaboration with the poet Frances Leviston, whose readings of her own texts frame the four movements of a piece which pays dual homage to Schubert and to Emily Dickinson. Nocturne for violin and cello bears witness to Suckling’s night vigils at the composing desk, setting down his pen as the stillness starts to ripple with birdsong, while the cello solo Her Lullaby is a nostalgic reflection on the early years of parenthood that also displays Suckling’s characteristically refined harmonic palette.

The benevolent shadow of Mozart meets a strain of emotional turbulence in Carl Nielsen’s unforgettable, at times inscrutable Clarinet Concerto – his last major orchestral work, completed three years before his death in 1931. Dating from two decades later, Aaron Copland’s concerto for the same instrument similarly bridges stylistic and expressive contrasts: composed with the genre-crossing expertise of Benny Goodman in mind, it brings a vein of lyrical sadness together with the verve of mid-century popular idioms from both the USA and Brazil.James MacMillan’s Tuireadh, meanwhile, is a single-minded outpouring of grief, raising instruments to an almost vocal quality of expression in a lament for the victims of the Piper Alpha oil-rig fire. Clarinettist Maximiliano Martín – an internationally active soloist as well as principal clarinet of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra – is joined here by the symphony orchestra of his native Tenerife in three works which truly cover the gamut of human emotion.

A protege of Henry Cooke, first director of the choir of the Chapel Royal after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Pelham Humfrey was part of a generation of musicians who enriched the musical life of their native England with influences drawn from continental Europe - from France, where Humfrey had studied between 1664 and 1667, and from the Italian musicians at work in the London to which he returned, succeeding Cooke in 1672.Today the same choir sings at St James's Palace, where the present recording was made by gracious permission of Her Majesty The Queen. Joined by a small instrumental ensemble led by Delphian regular Bojan Čičić, with an antiphonal layout inspired by records of the former chapel at Whitehall, this group of ten boy choristers and six adult singers revives the musical and devotional world of its former director, in intimate performances alive with its predecessors' improvisational flair.

A key presence in Glasgow’s musical life as composer and teacher, Oliver Iredale Searle is revealed in this first album devoted to his work as a poet of place and of sensation. Three works for wind ensembles vividly evoke journeys and their destinations, in a panoply of sights and sounds stretching from (and sometimes forging unexpected connections between) Chicago to Italy, the Baltic and Southeast Asia.The wind principals of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra provide performances of exceptional calibre, while Carla Rees’s passionate commitment to building a contemporary repertoire for Baroque flute shines through in a solo piece that she commissioned and premiered.

Erik Chisholm made his home as a musician in South Africa but it was in the Gaelic folk tunes of his native Scotland that he found lifelong inspiration for his songs.Modern yet instantly accessible and engaging, and revelling in the Scots language, their apparent simplicity belies the composer’s sophisticated craftsmanship.The master of twentieth-century song, Iain Burnside, and three of the brightest stars in the rmament of Scottish singers bring out the individual characters of these pieces, by turns haunting, tender and irreverent, making of each one a uniquely coloured little jewel.

Resident in the UK since his late teens, Hong Kong born composer Raymond Yiu has over the last twenty years developed a sophisticated yet defiantly eclectic style, heard to its best advantage here on his debut portrait album, with an all-star line-up of performers. The BBC Symphony Orchestra – appearing for the first time on Delphian – is joined by baritone Roderick Williams in a song-cycle specially commissioned to mark the centenary of the writer Anthony Burgess, while Andrew Watts’s countertenor voice brings an unforgettable human dimension to Symphony, written for the BBC Proms. Questions of identity, disguise and belonging are never far below the surface in Yiu’s music, whose playful demeanor is the vehicle for profound truths about a life lived between continents.

Period ensemble Spiritato's Delphian debut transports us back to a decisive juncture in the history of English music. The Taste of this Nation is a picture of the rapid arrival and astonishing success of Italian styles, genres and indeed musicians in London in the early 1700s, showing that a vibrant, cosmopolitan scene had arisen in the capital even before the arrival of Handel on British shores in 1710.

The feeling which many of us experienced in spring 2020 as, country by country, the world went into lockdown – a sense of life gone into standstill – was especially acute for musicians, deprived suddenly of both their livelihoods and the human connections that give their work meaning. For singers Helen Charlston and Michael Craddock, it was not only their art that they could no longer express publicly: they had been due to marry in April. Forced like so many to put plans of any kind on hold, Helen began to find ways of redirecting her creative energies. She wrote a poem for Michael to mark their postponed wedding date, and the composer Owain Park, a friend of the couple, set it to music. Helen began to contact other composers and poets, and unexpectedly but quickly a project took shape that would both fill the empty time and bear witness to it. The project chimed with Delphian’s determination to maintain the flow of album releases while live music was in abeyance, and so – with music again proving its ability to build connections across physical distance – the Isolation Songbook swiftly found a home on disc; recorded during the summer relaxation of restrictions, its release marks the anniversary of the beginning of lockdown in the UK.