As Jessica Duchen observes in her warmly sympathetic booklet notes, choral music presently accounts for over two-thirds of Roxanna Panufnik’s output. This latest miscellany focuses on some of her more recent additions to the genre. As the title-work – a luminous and enticing if understated setting of Jessica Powers – demonstrates, her writing for voices is always fluent and idiomatic, so it is a pity that the two larger pieces here seem less than convincing.

Rabindranath Tagore is among the most inherently musical of lyric poets but the by-numbers raga-writing of Unending Love does him less than justice, with a ‘Bollywood’ ending that verges on the stereotypical. Written to commemorate the start of the First World War, Since we parted deftly integrates poems by Robert Bulwer-Lytton and Kathleen Collins, though its evocative choral writing does not benefit from contributions by trumpets, harp and cello that tend to obscure rather than enhance. Modest in scope and intention, the remaining items are never less than enjoyable – not least the Magnificat and Nunc dimittis for St Pancras, which elides elegantly between its texts; a warmly expressive setting of Blake’s ‘A Cradle Song’ that avoids mawkishness; and, in Child of Heaven, verse from the Rig Veda in a hymn of steadily accumulating emotion and far more resourceful in its employment of Indian modal elements.

Singing throughout is secure and committed, as has long been associated with Ex Cathedra, directed with his customary skill by Jeffrey Skidmore and spaciously recorded at the Bramall Music Building of Birmingham University. Reservations notwithstanding, a pleasurable disc.