‘My hero is Benjamin Britten.’ This affirmation comes in a discussion from 2011 between Cheryl Frances-Hoad and Andrew Palmer, and its musical consequences can be heard in Frances-Hoad’s Invoke now the Angels, written to mark the 2013 Britten centenary. She describes the piece as ‘a response to Britten’s Canticles I and II’, and the text (by the Jamaican poet Kai Miller) underpins a gripping dramatic scena that deals with the kind of violence and sacrifice averted in the Bible’s Abraham and Isaac story but very much not averted in ‘The Parable of the Old Man and the Young’, a poem by Wilfred Owen set by Britten in War Requiem.

Neither here nor in the disc’s other especially memorable vocal setting, of the brief but searing ‘Lament’ by Andrew Motion, does Frances-Hoad closely imitate Britten. Rather, her music shares with his, and with that of British contemporaries as diverse as Judith Weir, Howard Skempton, Jonathan Dove and Joseph Phibbs, a sense of the inexhaustible lure of the diatonic and the consonant. Some will call it postmodern but the increasing confidence with which younger composers use such materials could make a case for calling it ‘populist’, were that term’s current political and social connotations less negative. At her best, Frances-Hoad is immediately accessible without being ephemeral, and the conviction and energy of the performances recorded here confirm the authenticity of the feelings and ideas being expressed. But there are risks involved too.

In Magic Lantern Tales (2015), settings of poems by Ian McMillan which have a strong anti-war theme, the overall effect is touching and strongly characterised, yet the admirable Nicky Spence has to use Yorkshire intonations which are difficult to bring off in this art-song context. The performers are more obviously at ease in the comical wordplay of Love Bytes and The Thought Machine, where the composer’s skill in finding texts that suit her and in providing winsome and witty music without sinking into the effortful or the earnest is simply delightful.

Scenes from Autistic Bedtimes, the last item on this well-filled CD, is the result of an operatic workshop that attempts something much more serious. When such unvarnished realism is aspired to, aesthetics can run into difficulties, and this trio of brief scenes contrasting the obsessive child (a remarkable assumption by the treble Edward Nieland) with the thoughts and reactions of his mother, starting with speech and progressing to ever-more intense song, still seems very much a work in progress. Frances-Hoad’s musical style, perfectly suited to the wide range of emotions, from tragic to comic, explored in the disc’s earlier items, falters in face of an agonisingly personal, painful set of circumstances that defies artistic representation. In context, however, that simply reinforces the unsparing honesty and clarity of what this disc as a whole has to offer.