Peter Warlock’s choral music hasn’t been particularly well served on disc – until this year, that is. Within a few months of the Blossom Street chamber choir’s fairly comprehensive download-only release (Resonus, 7/14), Naxos has followed suit with this. While Blossom Street covered new ground with world-premiere recordings of Warlock solo songs arranged for choir, The Carice Singers stick to the main roads of the composer’s repertoire with an attractive mix of unison carols and the better-known a cappella works.

Formed of young singers aged between 18 and 22, there’s a freshness to the choir’s tone that lends itself to the folk-simplicity of Warlock’s texts and settings. The Five Lesser Joys of Mary glows with warmth, every phrase buffed and burnished with careful musicality, while I saw a fair maiden has a fragile wonder that gets closer to the core of this exquisite carol than any recording I’ve heard. It’s also lovely to hear Warlock’s Cornish Carol (usually sung in English) performed in the original Cornish.

Where the choir struggle, however, is in the more extended, narrative works. Warlock’s epic-in-miniature The Full Heart lacks shape and musical arc, while ‘The Shrouding of the Duchess of Malfi’ is timid rather than coldly eerie. These young voices blend and tune beautifully together but lack the focus and rhetorical muscularity that so much of this music needs to brace its melodic sweetness.

These are pretty, accomplished performances of Warlock’s music; but, for something closer to the maverick composer’s own energetic ambiguity, Paul Spicer’s recording with the Finzi Singers (Chandos, 10/93) is still unsurpassed.