Paweł Łukaszewski; Ēriks Ešenvalds; Owain Park; Jaakko Mäntyjärvi; Cecilia McDowall: since Stephen Layton arrived at Trinity College Cambridge in 2007 the choir has balanced recordings of core repertoire with a rich seam of new music. The composers come from across Europe but there’s a consistent thread through Layton’s choices: music that’s diatonic-plus – accessible, effective, that celebrates the voices it’s written for. It’s a laudable use of Trinity’s profile and platform, a reservoir of new repertoire that has filtered down through choirs across the UK.

But is functionality and choral kerb-appeal enough? There’s an increasing homogeneity to the music on offer here, an anonymous quality to works that are attractive, uncontroversial and often all but interchangeable, each using what Andrew Mellor has previously described in these pages as the same ‘toolkit’ of techniques. The gulf between new music in the concert hall and church has never felt wider.

This latest release of music by Cecilia McDowall follows hot on the heels of the composer’s Novello Award for an outstanding body of work. It’s a typically meticulous recording by Layton and The Choir of Trinity College Cambridge, sensitive to every nuance of phrasing and articulation – a glossy account of a sequence of well-crafted anthems, with a bonus in the form of Alexander Hamilton’s account of McDowall’s O Antiphons for solo organ.

Perhaps the problem here is with sacred texts that, with a single exception, all establish the same broadly affirmative mood. There are quasi-medieval touches in Alma redemptoris, a nod to Lotti and Allegri in the more bittersweet Adoro te devote and an attractive textural effect in The Lord is good, in which two soprano soloists dart and dive swift-like in the foreground while the choir create a thick sonic cloudscape behind them, but the works tend to blend into one another without obvious points of difference. Even the obvious invitation to drama in the stirring opening lines of Love incorruptible – ‘Let all bitterness and wrath and anger be put away. Awake!’ – doesn’t rouse much response.

Only Standing as I do before God – a setting of nurse Edith Cavell’s words before her 1945 execution by firing squad – stands apart. A staunch, muscular solo from soprano Anita Monserrat brings McDowall’s musical portrait of the lone Cavell to life: a still point among eddying choral voices who offer something beyond mere affirmation.