When it comes to vocal music it’s less a case of boldly going where no man has gone before than boldly going where many have already been. The shadows of Holst, Vaughan Williams, Butterworth, Somervell and more hang around this collection of choral settings by the young British composer Owain Park (b1993). You scan the song titles – ‘Loveliest of trees’, ‘The cloud-capp’d towers’, ‘Into my heart an air that kills’ – and you hear music embedded with the familiar texts. It takes a brave composer to follow them, and it says much for Park’s quietly distinctive voice, his careful ear for text and texture, that by the end he makes each his own.

Take Housman’s famous ‘Loveliest of trees’. An upward arabesque by a solo soprano opens out into choral writing that’s thickly clustered, blossomy. The solitary observer so keenly painted in Butterworth’s song strikes out along different paths in the imitative ‘I will go’ entries, fanning out across the texture. Shakespeare’s ‘cloud-capp’d towers’ reach upwards in misty, ambiguous progressions, cleverly receding and approaching through the texture. Elsewhere in this effective cycle – Shakespeare Songs of Night-Time – we get drama as well as atmospherics in the playful ‘Weary with toil’, in addition to the menacing, incantatory ‘Now it is the time of night’.

At just 26 years old, Park already has a full choral recording of his music (Hyperion, A/18). This release introduced the composer in meticulous, rapturous performances by The Choir of Trinity College Cambridge. If this new collection by Tim Reader’s Epiphoni Consort lacks their polish, it’s an attractive sampler of new repertoire, dominated by secular part-songs and choral cycles.

But for all the effectiveness of these secular works, it’s in the anthems that Park is most interesting, most ambitious. Holy is the True Light and especially Antiphon for the Angels are striking, substantial works. Park’s sometime composition teacher John Rutter is quoted in the booklet describing his ‘towers of sound’. This sense of architectural as well as sonic scope underpins the thrilling Antiphon, its solo violin (expressively played by Gabriella Jones) flickering around the choral body of sound, the ‘spirited light’ described in Hildegard of Bingen’s verse.

I’m not sure Epiphoni’s forward-thrusting, full-blooded sound suits music that delights in elision and occlusion, in soft, fraying edges. Park’s are not loud statements; the interest is all in the detail, the precise marriage of text and tone colour. But a whisper can carry further than a shout, and I suspect we’ll be hearing a lot more from him.