Robert Kyr (b1952) represents a curious phenomenon: a composer just now achieving mainstream recognition after a long, productive creative life guided less by current fashions and more by a far-reaching spiritual exploration that allows him to ignore outside expectations and compose with a broad palette of texts by saints and mystics, and to express their words not with a need to project his own compositional voice but with an instinctively appropriate mixture of high-concept choral harmonies and near-vernacular song, seasoned with well-selected exotic world-music influences. Giving this disc the blindfold test – knowing absolutely nothing about him and never having heard his music before – I supposed that he was a bit over 30, maybe from Arabic heritage but trained in the US. As it turns out, he’s over 60, as American as can be, and teaching at the Oregon School of Music.

What all of this adds up to is beautiful, thoughtful, sincere music with far more emotional complexity than Morten Lauridsen but expressed in a manner that’s not so individual and doesn’t really strive to be. The opening piece on this disc sets the tone: The Singer’s Ode (2012), his own version of ‘An die Musik’, with heartfelt words written by the composer that talk about giving himself over selflessly to an art that seems to exist outside of himself. This is important to note: perhaps the main reason this disc is so inviting – and it’s inviting indeed – is its lack of any holier-than-thou pretension. As suggested by the title of one of the main cantatas on the disc, The Cloud of Unknowing, no denominational agenda is apparent. This is who he is, and he’d love to share that with you.

The disc’s two cantatas – the other being Songs of the Soul, and both written within the last three years – draw on texts from many sources and in a variety of languages, with psalms in Latin, texts by St Teresa of Avila in Castilian and anonymous texts, almost all of which are so stimulating that one is happy to have this disc just to read the booklet. And though he talks about having JS Bach as a model, Kyr uses a sense of counterpoint that’s loose-limbed, more like poetic simultaneity. Much of the music feels through-composed, building slowly but effectively. One of the best pieces is the least characteristic, a movement titled ‘Enduring’ that is more animated than much of the rest, with voices leapfrogging over each other, happily recalling some of the more playful moments in early Britten. Word-painting is in evidence but never heavy-handed. Orchestra, when used at all, is used sparingly, sometimes with a solo obbligato (the most Bach-like aspect of his music) but usually as an unobtrusive frame, often with shimmering tremolos that are played a few notches above a whisper. It should sound like a cliché but doesn’t.

Performances are what one would expect from Conspirare under Craig Hella Johnson – sincere, sung with a full-throated tone and always ready to reach towards something ecstatic, all perfect for SACD technology. How can one be disappointed in that? Well, I am. Given that individuality seems not to be one of Kyr’s priorities, I prefer a performance style with less sound and more specificity. Of the two vocal soloists, the soprano Estelí Gomez is completely on the right page with a beautifully produced voice and a bit of other-worldly detachment that I miss from the borderline-vernacular tone of the baritone David Farwig.