Irish composer Seán Doherty has an impressive roster of awards and performances under his belt, but so far a discography that lags behind. This new release from chamber choir New Dublin Voices and conductor Bernie Sherlock offers the first professional showcase for the Derry-born musician, who also happens to be a member of Sherlock’s ensemble.

Doherty’s political and social convictions are clear from his subject matter – the Easter Rising, the October Revolution, pacifism. Elsewhere themes tend towards the darker end of the spectrum: death, ghosts, graves, madness, isolation. There’s comfort to be had from nature and faith, but rarely ecstasy or unclouded skies. Even a comic folk song arrangement Bean Pháidín comes tinged with violence.

Which perhaps explains the sameness of this recital. Again and again we find ourselves in a cloudy sub-Whitacre world of pleasantly clustery ambiguity. Neither the anger nor the ‘lonely impulse of delight’ of Yeats’s An Irish Airman Foresees his Death are evident in Doherty’s oddly muted, arm’s-length setting for lower voices. Under-Song opens with a promising jungle soundscape of birdcalls and water trickles but soon settles into a lulling pastel stasis.

There are some effective textures: the whirling snowfall and tooth-chattering chill of Snow Dance for the Dead, the echoing halo of upper voices in St Columba’s In te, Christe – built up into an insistent tintinnabulation. But the same textural tricks tend to recur. Doherty enjoys sound effects: whispers, portamentos, often establishing a short melodic cell before treating it as an ostinato (sometimes layered as in opener Time or in the central section of Epiphany, where the skittering rising scales feel like a close cousin of Britten’s Hymn to St Cecilia, sometimes blurred in aleatoric echoes as in The Graves at Arbour Hill) behind a lyrical main melody.

The occluded diction and the breathy quality of New Dublin Voices adds to the sense of generalised soft focus. It’s exciting when we get to hear Sherlock’s singers let off the leash in a proper forte (I am the World), but the pervasive warm mezzo-piano just doesn’t excite sufficiently.