On April 3 the Blenheim Singers, in Exeter College Chapel, made a powerful contribution to Oxford Passiontide music this year with T’was For Thy Sake, a well-chosen group of fairly modern English pieces, put into perspective by a 17th-century masterpiece, Thomas Weelkes’s Hosanna to the Son of David.

The group’s young director, Tom Hammond-Davies (pictured with the singers, right), tells me that his object, in their annual Messiah performances at Blenheim Palace (started 2006) is to avoid the ‘churchy’ quality which so often spoils Handel oratorios – “too much concentration on ‘seamless flow’, not enough on diction and the meaning of the text”. In this concert, supported by The Edgar Bainton (UK) Society, his 16 singers showed just what he had in mind; every word was clear in several notable texts, for example Bainton’s In The Wilderness, a very modest setting of Robert Graves’s powerful poem about the wandering Christ followed by the ‘guileless old scapegoat’.

An excellent contrast was afforded by the juxtaposition of Holst’s This Have I Done For My True Love and Herbert Howells’s simple, deeply felt Requiem. The first is a splendidly vivid setting of the old Cornish carol beginning Tomorrow shall be my dancing day, with the sopranos bringing the freshest sound to the chorus Sing, oh! my love. The Requiem is a work of intimate grief, originating in Howells’s loss of his son; Hammond-Davies brought out dynamic contrasts with great care, culminating in the most exquisite pianissimo at the close of the final Requiem aeternam. The brief solo contributions were not impressive, but in Kenneth Leighton’s Crucifixus pro nobis (1960) we heard the tenor Julian Forbes doing powerful justice to the 17th-century poet Patrick Carey, a specialist in gruesome, Catholic Passion imagery.

Another contributor to a rich evening was the organist Alistair Reid, who showed off Exeter’s fine instrument in the harrowing Litanies of the Parisian organist Jehan Alain. But what I shall best remember was the magnificent choral attack which turned Weelkes’s Hosanna into a blaze of glory.