Opera and song are at the heart of Gordon Getty’s work and spring as much from his love for poetry – some of the works here feature his own – as from his distinctive melodic-minimalist music. That music is appealingly direct, shuns needless harmony and melisma, and makes distinctive use of the plain intervals, common chords, whole-tone scales and foundation stones of hymnody and musical theatre that have underpinned so much American music for more than a century.

As instantly appealing as his aesthetic is, it is also restricted. I found the experience of reading Getty’s poem ‘Beauty Come Dancing’ more moving than that of hearing his setting of it. Across the 11 songs here – all for the unusual combination of large chorus (often singing in unison) with orchestra – I was struck by a consistent feeling that Getty’s music springs from a single impulse born of each poem rather than the shifting beauty, complexity or inner music of their texts. Many of his settings gambol through the words in reciting rhythms (for all the clarity, it’s mostly impossible to decipher the words being sung on this recording) rather than illuminating their own beauty and differentiation. The net result, to my ears, is a loss to both and a certain feeling that something is missing from the middle.

The best work is the longest, ‘The Old Man in the Night’ (another text by Getty himself), in which the journey is often patient, nuanced and interesting. Getty has plenty of time-honed tools and good ideas at his disposal, especially when he uses and gently subverts a dance form, as in ‘Ballet russe’ (setting his beloved John Masefield) and in ‘Beauty Come Dancing’. When nostalgia gets the better of him, as in ‘Those who love the most’ (to a poem by Sara Teasdale), there isn’t enough in the score to stop it sinking into something sappy. And I wonder if the music would have been better served by a vocal ensemble more nimble than the 70-strong Netherlands Radio Choir, whose blend, brightness and focus aren’t all they could have been.