Stephen Paulus was an astonishingly prolific fixture of the American music scene, with some 600 works to his credit. His sudden death in 2014 left classical music – particularly the worlds of opera and choral music – significantly the poorer, so it’s inevitable that we should see his legacy memorialised with new additions to the catalogue. Two such new recordings, both devoted to Paulus’s choral works, come from The Choir of Royal Holloway under Rupert Gough and Arizona’s True Concord Voices & Orchestra conducted by Eric Holtan.

The centrepiece of True Concord’s ‘Far in the Heavens’ is Prayers and Remembrances, an extended work for choir and orchestra commissioned by the ensemble to mark the 10th anniversary of 9/11. A programme-note by Paulus himself describes the work as ‘spiritual but not necessarily religious’ – a subtitle that could apply to much of the composer’s abundantly lyric, soothingly consonant works. While it’s a musical language that speaks earnestly and directly, I question the impact of such sustained sweetness over such an extended, seven-movement work. In a work honouring such a violent tragedy, when does defiant optimism tip over into denial? The rest of the collection fares better, with standouts including the unabashedly sentimental Little Elegy, and True Concord’s soft-serve vocal blend gilds the unaccompanied works especially with a halo of resonance.

Royal Holloway’s ‘Calm on the Listening Ear of Night’ sets Paulus’s music in dialogue with another Midwestern composer, René Clausen. It’s Clausen whose musical personality emerges most strongly here in these precise performances. His works offer a distinctively American spin on the fashionable Baltic sound world of Ešenvalds and Vasks that is as appealing as it is generous. In pace, which opens the disc, offers eight minutes of lushly filmic excess. Plainchant and modal harmonies ground gestures of frank sentimentalism in something more substantial (though this recording lacks the ambient acoustic richness the work cries out for), and with the later A Jubilant Song we get the rhythmic liveliness lacking elsewhere on an album themed around nocturnal calm.

Paulus’s contributions include the multi movement Jesu Carols, a clear nod to Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols with its harp accompaniment (though the carols are set for full voices rather than just upper). Messiaen and Poulenc, rather than Britten, though, are the shadowy presences behind much of the set, particularly the sudden harmonic sideways glances of ‘Waye not his cribb’.

Paulus’s works are emotive miniatures. Elegantly executed, sensitive in orchestration as well as choral textures and techniques, they serve America’s ever-hungry choral institutions supremely well. It’s no criticism, then, to say that they are neither suited nor intended to be listened to back-to-back. An album’s worth of Paulus is altogether too rich, too unvarying a dish to satisfy. A little astringency would go a long way in setting these works into dramatic and emotional relief.