The English Catholic liturgy is far less well served by contemporary composers than its Anglican counterpart. Colin Mawby is a rare exception – a figure who has spent over three decades working within the Catholic Church as organist, as conductor (including 15 years as Master of Music at Westminster Cathedral) and, chiefly, as composer. This selection of Mawby’s choral works by The Choir of Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, released late in 2016 to celebrate the composer’s 80th birthday year, is a heartfelt homage from an ensemble with a long relationship to Mawby and his music.

Mawby is above all a composer of functional church music, with a sympathetic understanding both of congregational needs (his Eucharistic chants will be familiar to many who might not know the composer’s name) and of congregational wishes for direct, emotionally accessible works. The result is a sequence of effective anthems and settings in two contrasting modes.

We open in festal joy and scope in the Liverpool Gloria, bright with brass fanfares and declamatory choral writing. The same energy and modal harmonies recur in the two dancing settings of the Regina caeli, neatly sung by Liverpool’s trebles under the direction of Christopher McElroy, and the assertive Cantate with its cori spezzati-style opening. In contrast are the pastel-coloured Ave verum corpus, all smudgy added-note chords and hymn-like simplicity, the other-worldly Celtic Blessing and the Salve regina – a modal, Howellsian meditation for trebles.

There’s a lot of Howells here, one way and another, but never quite brought into full dramatic focus. The effect, especially as delivered by a choir consistently lighter and more distant in the mix than the organ, is of clouds of musical incense – pleasantly scented but ultimately evanescent.