Works by two composers deeply grounded in cathedral music provided two of the most satisfying premières of last year during its closing weeks.

Paul Spicer's impressive new hour-long Advent Oratorio, heard in Lichfield Cathedral, set a well-chosen, subtly inflected scriptural Advent text by the Bishop of Durham, Dr Tom Wright.

The career of Paul Spicer, a former chorister of New College, Oxford, has embraced teaching, choral conducting, BBC radio production, biographies (of Herbert Howells and George Dyson), and chairmanship of the Gerald Finzi Society. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of English composers, and has revealed himself as also a composer of formidable authority and power.

His oeuvre includes, as well as songs, anthems, organ pieces, and woodwind solos, a wonderful Easter Oratorio (also with a text by Bishop Wright), which deserves to form part of every choral society's repertoire; and The Deciduous Cross - pungent choral settings, with some electrifying writing for wind and brass ensemble, of the Welsh poet R. S. Thomas.

Both Spicer's and Rathbone's achievement is to have produced a weighty but approachable extended work, free of cant, that might easily replace or sit alongside, for example, Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on Christmas Carols, to make for a less syrupy concert than is often to be heard in Advent.

The musical weight and intellectual vigour of Advent Oratorio, vitally conducted through its several slick, fiery scherzi by the organist of Lichfield Cathedral, Philip Scriven, was immensely satisfying - although it took half the work for him to prise sentience from the boy choristers, who unexpectedly blossomed in the tenth movement, and later again as angels. The oratorio gave me hope that this "retro" approach to post-Elgar large-scale English choral works need not result in something limp, sentimental, or predictable.

Lichfield Cathedral Special Choir (also celebrating an anniversary, its 50th) delivered its part handsomely - eyes were up, unlike the Forest Choir's. Firm and evocative instrumental writing showed to advantage the maturity and artistry of Spicer's writing. The main soloists (three, as in Easter Oratorio), all adroit artists - the Baroque specialist Natalie Clifton-Griffith, the usually lithe but here rather too unbending tenor Ed Lyon, and, the best of the three, the baritone William Berger - enticed, although rarely quite shone.

Shining was reserved for a resplendent Voice of God, intoned from on high in the west end by the baritone Philip Lancaster, a member of the cathedral choir; and for the almost effortless-sounding, fluent countertenor Philip Jones, who, in the first part of Handel's Messiah, which formed the evening's fractionally lopsided second half, knocked spots off them all.

This review by Roderic Dunnett first appeared in issue 7660 of the Church Times on 8 January 2010.