Hugo Weisgall, who died in 1997 at the age of 85 with a number of new projects in various states of completion, was nothing if not a vocal composer. His first international acclaim came from his 1956 operatic retelling of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author and the peak of his success came nine operas later with his biblically inspired Esther in 1993.

So it stands to reason that the strengths of this collection lie in Weisgall’s sensitivity to text. What comes as a surprise, given his status as an American composer is how much more freely his Four Choral Etudes (1960) flow in Hebrew than his Psalm of the Distant Dove (1992) does in English. I’m sure part of this comes from contrasting the lucid musicality of the BBC Singers in the former and the brittle (to my ears) tone quality of soprano Ana María Martínez in the latter, but there’s a palpable sense of connection in the choral settings that doesn’t spring from the page when he sets the English language.

A Garden Eastward (1952), a cantata for soprano and orchestra, is the most consistent of these works, but its success owes less to its English text than it does to the fullness of its orchestration, which seems to emerge quite organically as a unified conception. Even away from the opera stage, Weisgall remained operatic to the core.

In T’kiatot: Rituals for Rosh Hashana (1986), the composer is at his lowest ebb. Lacking a text on which to hang the music, his self-described ‘non-tonal melodies’ fail to soar, or even sustain much interest. Though it shows genuine understanding of the language of the Second Viennese School, Weisgall’s piece has very little of its own to say.