This is a curious project. Suzi Digby and her new professional choir ORA champion today’s British choral composers as the Byrds and Tallises of our time – the creators of a ‘second golden age of choral music’. With this in mind, Digby has devised a programme for the ensemble’s debut disc that pairs Byrd’s Mass for Five Voices with contemporary musical responses to each of its movements, commissioned from Roxanna Panufnik, Francis Pott, Alexander L’Estrange, Owain Park and Charlotte Bray, with Byrd’s Ave verum corpus and Roderick Williams’s ‘reimagined’ response as the disc’s coda.

It’s perhaps a missed trick that these contemporary mirror-works are grouped together in the second half of the recording, rather than alternating with their musical inspirations, but it does leave the ensemble’s exquisite performance of the Mass whole and uninterrupted. Set against the blanched purity of a group such as The Tallis Scholars, ORA’s tone is more off-white – chill taken off by the character in these youthful voices. Digby’s direction is about as interventionist as you can get in this repertoire without being mannered. Crescendos swell through the Gloria and pacing surges and stills with emotion always at the fore.

Six premieres give this disc plenty of musical meat but what’s surprising is the near-unanimity of the new works’ sound worlds. Thick cluster chords, hazy and impressionistic, dissolve Byrd’s music like water dripped on to a manuscript score. Plainsong melodies drift to the fore, as do Byrd’s own thematic cells. Tonality is stretched but never fully abandoned. The result functions as a very plausible musical whole in its own right, even if it might have been nice to have startled this enduring musical source with just one or two more experimental responses.

Rising choral star Owain Park’s meditative Upheld by Stillness takes its inspiration from Byrd’s Sanctus and Benedictus, weaving a work of flickering movement and unshowy invention. Like Bray’s Agnus Dei, it takes a more abstract approach to its source material than the thematic and harmonic manipulations of Panufnik’s Kyrie or the welcome rhythmic drive of Pott’s Laudate Dominum. Dwarfing all these for size is L’Estrange’s extended Show me, deare Christ – a centrepiece whose complicated collage text and episodic musical structure both demand and reward many listens.