When the composer William Petter died in 2016 he was just 34 years old. This first collection of his choral music, recorded posthumously in 2016 by a group of his musician friends and colleagues, is both a touching personal memorial and a tantalising glimpse of a talent just coming into bloom.

Two complete Mass settings are the centrepieces of a disc of sacred music for choir and organ. A former New College chorister, Petter’s music grows ingenuously out of the English tradition of cathedral music in which he was trained. Holst, Finzi, Tavener and particularly Howells all feed into these works but there’s also a strong seam of plainchant, as well as a debt to the French sacred tradition of Duruflé and Fauré, and more than a nod to Switzerland’s Frank Martin.

Petter has a gift for vocal spacing, and the result is spacious music that seems, in these accomplished and carefully blended performances, deftly conducted by Peter Foggitt, to hang suspended in the air – harmonies shifting and reforming like a cloud of dust particles caught in the light of a cathedral window. The result, in the opening Vigil Mass, is music of affirmative, accessible beauty – asking expansive questions and always finding joy in the answers. The lulling, gentle waves of the Sanctus console, while the Agnus Dei opens the door to doubt and urgency – a solo cello (echoes of The Protecting Veil) a passionate, wordless intercessor.

The St Magnus Mass has a smokier, more incense-steeped darkness to it, pitting muscular choral forces against one another before the Sanctus and Agnus Dei illuminate the texture. The shorter motets are attractive works with an eye to liturgical functionality but the final hymn-anthem Come down, O love divine is something larger – in every sense. A meditation on Vaughan Williams’s glorious melody, it pays homage to one composer with tremendous skill and scope, without ever losing the voice of its new author.