A casual listener tuning into a selection of today’s contemporary choral music may easily be led to believe that only two choices are available: luxuriate in the warm tonal afterglow of an Eric Whitacre or Morton Lauridsen, or chance your luck with the challenging vocal sounds of more avant-garde composers such as Evan Johnson, Cassandra Miller and James Weeks. In truth, some of the most interesting examples occupy a middle ground between these two polarities, as heard on this richly rewarding recording of choral works sung by Yale Schola Cantorum under David Hill.

Stacked tonal clusters have become something of a choral cliché in recent years. Likewise vocal sounds and timbres from outside the mainstream classical tradition. Both techniques are heard in the Canadian composer Tawnie Olson’s Magnificat, yet are used here with a clear purpose in mind – to communicate a message through the Latin text about female strength and empowerment. Yale Schola Cantorum are joined by the Elm City Girls’ Choir in a taut, focused setting that revolves around a series of colourful antiphonal exchanges between the two female choruses. The non-classical vocal elements are heard in Olson’s adoption of a singing sound and style reminiscent of Bulgarian women’s choruses, which represents, in the composer’s words, ‘female strength and determination’.

A different kind of determination underpins Roderick Williams’s A New England Symphony. This four-movement work for unaccompanied voices draws on the stories of early American settlers’ determination to survive in a new and often hostile environment. Williams’s first-hand knowledge of vocal writing – his distinctive baritone voice will be familiar to many – is evident throughout, such as in a haunting second movement (‘By night when others soundly slept’), where delicate whole-tone textures are employed to evoke unconditional love in Anne Bradstreet’s religious poem.

Williams writes with a Britten-esque clarity of choral sound that is not always present in Reena Esmail’s large-scale This Love Between Us. Esmail’s ambitious seven-movement work sets seven prayers from around the world and visits not only familiar faiths such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Christianity and Islam but also some of its oldest, including Zoroastrianism and Jainism. Throw into the mix a chorus and orchestra comprising both Western and non-Western instrumentation (sitar and tabla feature prominently in several movements), and it’s perhaps no surprise that the music struggles at times to strike a neat balance between all elements. Nevertheless, the work is a significant addition to another important middle stream in choral music (with Roxanna Panufnik arguably its most important practitioner to date), where multicultural musical elements are combined within a multi-faith context.