The ancient English choral tradition meets contemporary American choral music in ‘Rolling River’, the latest recording from Graham Ross and the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge. It’s a happy union. The silvery, naive sound of the current Clare line-up finds a good match in the ingenuous quality of much of this attractive spread of repertoire.

Bernstein and Barber are present and correct (though no Copland), with the living generation represented by an eclectic mix of composers including Jennifer Higdon, David Lang and Eric Whitacre. And then there’s an unexpected cameo from Howells, whose JFK-dedicated Take him, earth, for cherishing sneaks him a little dubiously into qualification.

The Chichester Psalms is the headliner, with no less than Iestyn Davies as soloist. It’s a starry choice, and makes sense with a top line of women rather than boy choristers, but the effect is of knowing, crafted beauty and control rather than the rougher, haphazard sweetness of a child. This in turn takes the edge off the threat of the ‘Lamah rag’shu’ violence that breaks through in the second movement.

Light-footed and gilded-bright in the Bernstein, elsewhere the choir are at their best in a sequence that moves from Higdon’s glistening, gauzy O magnum mysterium for choir, flutes, crystal glass and chimes, through Caroline Shaw’s airy psalm-setting and the swallow, with its wordless melodic contrails, to arrive at Eric Whitacre’s rhapsodic Leonardo Dreams of his Flying Machine.

But there’s less clarity and differentiation of mood than one might hope. Asked to create two contrasting sound worlds for Barber’s ‘Twelfth Night’ and ‘To be Sung on the Water’, there’s no obvious shift of tone-colour or quality between the love-haze of the latter and Laurie Lee’s dark night of the soul. It’s a similar story in the Howells, whose episodic text and setting both demand greater clarity and precision of articulation. And both Muhly’s theatrical A Good Understanding and David Lang’s protect yourself from infection need more than prettiness to pull them off.