Drink provided an essential lubricant to the composition of Peter Warlock’s carol Bethlehem Down. Short of cash, Warlock and his librettist Bruce Blunt decided to flog a carol to the Daily Telegraph, and the words of Bethlehem Down were duly conceived during a pub crawl. Under his real name of Philip Heseltine, Warlock was a Christ Church graduate, so Bethlehem Down qualifies for inclusion on Christ Church Choir’s new CD, Treasures of Christ Church (Avie AV2215): all 17 tracks have some connection with the college.

Sometimes the connection is direct: for instance, the college possesses a 1760s manuscript of Zadok the Priest, with Handel’s own arrangement for organ replacing the usual orchestral accompaniment.

Clive Driskill-Smith plays this organ version on the CD, gradually building up to a great climax before the first choral entry: it is most effective. Incidentally, Driskill-Smith now lives in the cottage Christ Church provided for its former scholar W.H. Auden in 1972. Auden collaborated with Benjamin Britten on A Shepherd’s Carol, one of the CD’s most moving tracks.

John Rutter, on the other hand, has a more distant connection: he’s represented by the first-ever recording of his Britten-esque Canticle of the Heavenly City, written for Iffley Church, which is under Christ Church patronage.

With composers running from the college’s first informator choristarum, John Taverner, to Christ Church alumni William Walton and Howard Goodall (his Veni, Sancte Spiritus is another first recording), present day director of music Stephen Darlington lets each piece speak for itself — he doesn’t go in for vocal pyrotechnics, and there are no strong contrasts between the tracks. The choir, which sounds as if it particularly enjoyed the Goodall piece and Darlington’s own chirpy arrangement of Jacob’s Ladder, is well balanced, although soloists sometimes sound unnaturally close to the microphone. But that’s a quibble, this enterprising CD should bring pleasure to many.