Hitting two anniversary targets with one release, Tenebrae celebrate both the 100th anniversary of Polish independence and the 50th birthday of Poland’s leading choral composer, Paweł Łukaszewski. ‘Daylight Declines’ is – for both good and ill – a fair reflection of a composer whose musical language is among the most instantly recognisable in the business.

At the level of the single motet or part song, Łukaszewski’s often chant-like word-setting, his episodic structures based around a sequence of repeated motifs and ostinato, and his tonal harmony – cloudy cluster-chords gently spiced with astringent dissonance – can be very effective. It’s a language whose timelessness (fostered by modal harmonies, strategic use of bare fourths and fifths, and some organum-style parallel movement) lends itself well to liturgical settings. The central set of Tenebrae Responsories shows this off to best advantage, the penitential texts blossoming into shadowy beauty, painted with softest, smudgiest brushstrokes by Nigel Short and his fine singers.

But taken as a whole it’s an album that also stresses the limitations of the composer. There’s something ungainly about vocal writing that often feels like it has been conceived at the piano – awkwardly triadic and jerky in its movement – and if his instinct for language (much stressed in the booklet essay) is keen in a generalised sort of way, his settings are limited by such a narrow musical vocabulary. Gentle melancholy, contemplation and meditation are all well served; but what about the joy we might expect from Cantate Domino, rhetoric that develops along with the verse’s argument in the Shakespeare Sonnets, violence that goes beyond musical hand-wringing in the closing Beati?

Tenebrae, as ever, make the most of their material but whether the endeavour is worth it is another matter.