If Humperdinck and Hindemith seem like odd bedfellows, try adding Finzi, Berg and Ravel to the mix and you’ll find yourself with ‘Birds of Paradise’ – the wide-roaming new album from Bart Van Reyn’s Octopus Chamber Choir. Of course it’s a thematic programme, but even such a literal guiding thread can fray when faced with such anarchic musical breadth.

It’s fortunate, then, that Octopus (heard here in their smallest format – at their largest the group can expand up to 100 singers for symphonic projects) have the skills to sell their mixed merchandise. The hazy beauty of the opener – Ravel’s Trois beaux oiseaux du Paradis – and the ecstatic beauty of its soprano solo by Grace Davidson, sets the tone for a programme unified by close-knit choral blend, soft-focus at its edges, and a real lyric generosity and warmth.

While Hindemith’s Un cigne provides a welcome dose of astringency – sliding glass panels of harmonies constantly and delicately shifting – it’s about the only acid note in a programme that does tend to damask-upholstered Romantic comfort. Taken in isolation, Rheinberger’s Abendfriede, Stanford’s The Blue Bird and Humperdinck’s Fruhlingssehnsucht are all emotive miniatures, but as a sequence of tracks they blur into dangerous sentimentality.

Two premiere recordings have mixed success. Jonathan Harvey’s Song of June is an unexpectedly direct piece of musical word-painting, its descriptive pastoral leavened with percussive rhythmic energy. Ivor R Davies’s The Prayer of the Raven, by contrast, is an awkward quasi-spiritual, whose cynical words chafe against the full-throated fervour of the setting.