To have one first-class ensemble recording your music may be regarded as fortunate. To assemble no fewer than five on one disc begins to look like a pattern … The personnel on this collage of choral works by British composer Joanna Marsh are seriously starry. I Fagiolini, Stile Antico and Voces8 join newcomers The Lyons Mouth (graduates of Robert Hollingworth’s singing programme at York) and the RLPO and associated Youth and Children’s choirs to create a recital that presents a portrait of a musician with plenty to say.

Strands of recurring interest emerge through the 15 tracks: ecology and the natural world; Renaissance polyphony; a playful musical whimsy. The latter’s an interesting element – a musical wink among the straight faces and middle distance gazes of contemporary choral music.

Marsh’s four contributions to I Fagiolini’s 2021 project ‘Rewilding the Wasteland’ inject some welcome wit. Geocentric uses American poet Pattiann Rogers’s joyously over-ripe verse as the fermenting seed for a musical grotesque – contrapuntal speech-song lurching and sliding in tipsy, jazz-inflected lines (a gift to I Fagiolini’s expressive diction), while ‘little scherzetto’ metachoral in blue has something of Ligeti’s Nonsense Madrigals about its hairpin bends of tone and mood. Dialogo and Quodlibet offers a playful sidewise glance at 16th-century polyphony: a musical commentary on itself, tongue firmly in cheek.

Elsewhere we meet a different, lusher Marsh in the ravishing (and much-performed) carol In Winter’s House, the Novello-nominated Donne-setting Batter my heart and the Novello-winning eight-voice All shall be well – a meditation on change and eternity, which clusters parts like moss on top of bare counterpoint, polyphony as a living, fecund tradition. A Plastic Theatre – the choral cantata that gives the album its name – is a tougher nut to crack, however: an earnest, singable contribution to youth choir repertoire (with some glorious solo contributions from mezzo Jennifer Johnston) but one that wears its seriousness of purpose a little too zealously.

All performances here are strong, the programming allowing each ensemble to play to its strengths – whether Voces8’s glossy blend, Stile Antico’s sober purity or I Fagiolini’s extrovert musical drama. The Lyons Mouth hold their own among the veterans, as yet less distinct in identity, but flexible, supple vehicles for Marsh’s broad musical vision.