This is an enterprising disc from Chandos, which has reached out a long arm to bring in an accomplished American choir. Everything here is likeable both as composition and as performance. If one feels, as Shakespeare puts it, ‘that’s all one’, the responsibility lies more with the choice of composers: there is a certain sameness of flavour left behind – a shifting of chords, major to minor, an alternation of ‘easy’ harmonies and ‘soft’ dissonances. Possibly the recorded sound should be brighter, the words clearer, the choral tone a little more sharply edged even if that would endanger the presently faultless blend. It’s a fine recital even so, and one that should please a wide range of listeners.

Several of the items are claimed as première recordings, and others are scantly represented in the British catalogues. Of Matthew Harris (b1956), nothing else appears to be available, these seven numbers from his various books of Shakespeare songs affording an attractive introduction. Jaako Mäntyjärvi, described in the notes as ‘a quirky Finn’, has fun with the Macbeth witches’ ‘Double, double, toil and trouble’, the most memorable of the ‘new’ compositions if not necessarily the best. Best, I should say, are the familiar settings by Frank Martin and Vaughan Williams, but everything earns its welcome – including the O mistress mine setting by Major Alan Murray. It is not another I’ll walk beside you, but shares with that song an unpretentious directness, and a sense of carrying not one note too many.