Don’t be fooled by the cartoon cover – you haven’t accidentally bought The King’s Singers’ Disney disc (released back in April). Whatever the playful artwork might suggest, ‘Wonderland’ actually sits at the grittier end of the group’s impossibly broad spectrum – a collage of contemporary works in which Ligeti supplies the ‘traditional’ quota of repertoire.

As musical commissioners, no one works harder to feed the pipeline of new choral works than The King’s Singers, as they prove amply here. There are recent commissions from the likes of Ola Gjeilo, Judith Bingham and Joe Hisaishi as well as throwbacks from the ensemble’s first decade by Malcolm Williamson and Paul Patterson. It’s an eclectic line-up, showing off the group’s stylistic range, as well (with a little help from Ligeti’s ferociously challenging Nonsense Madrigals) as their technique.

The madrigals supply the recital’s through-line, alternating with the other works. You can see the logic: the Ligeti is zany and witty and fun, but also musically overwhelming in its complexity – your ears and brain need time to recover. But I’m not completely certain it works. There’s a danger that these chewy, aphoristic gems – little bullets of musical brilliance – obliterate all around, making everything else seem baggy at best, facile at worst.

I’m afraid Makiko Kinoshita’s trippy opener Ashita no uta, inspired by the turning earth, melts away to nothing, and Gjeilo’s schmaltzy Dream Within a Dream doesn’t fare much better. But Bingham’s playful drama Tricksters (pairing each singer with a different mythological trickster-god) is a delight, a perfect companion-piece to Williamson’s musical fable The Musicians of Bremen, with its ragged chorus of animal narrators, and Patterson’s impeccably witty Garden of Eden-rewriting, Time Piece. Even without the ‘amateur dramatics’ the booklet essay promises on stage, they both soar off the page thanks to the lightly worn skill of the singers, slipping in and out of styles and genres even within a single work.

Hisaishi’s bleakly powerful I was there feels like it belongs on another disc (its theme – cultural memories of tragedy – seems at odds with all around), especially when flanked by Ligeti’s sound-watercolour ‘The Alphabet’ and the expansive musical dramatics of ‘Flying Robert’. All the madrigals are crisp and right in the groove – a pretty flawless set of sonic experiments and wisecracks. Disney this emphatically ain’t.