Founded in 2012, the Polish six-voice ensemble proMODERN are a seriously exciting group. There are obvious parallels with James Weeks’s Exaudi or Paul Hillier’s Theatre of Voices but proMODERN’s sound is all their own – lean, sinewy and infinitely agile. A collective of soloists with an enormous technical toy-box, the group is surely a composer’s dream, offering limitless possibilities.

Which makes the uniformity and lack of musical ambition of these new settings of Shakespeare sonnets all the more disappointing. Booklet notes explain little about the genesis of the project but most of the 18 settings (all by Polish composers with the exception of Philip Lawson’s Sonnet 104) stay within a very safe compass, both technically and stylistically. There’s an anonymity to the writing, smudgy with cluster-chords, structured again and again around similar patterns of rhythmic repetition, and by the end you’re left with only a generalised impression of pieces that all bleed and drift into one another.

And then there’s the issue of the Shakespeare itself. There’s a reason certain sonnets have been set again and again and not others; denser and more verbally playful than the speeches or songs, these knotty, often highly conceptual texts don’t lend themselves to easy musical evocation or aural digestion, especially when diction is as occluded as here.

But through the haze some works do stand out. Pawel Łukaszewski’s two settings (Sonnets 27 and 60) retain their composer’s signature melodic richness and harmonic fingerprint, and the folk energy and primal rhythmic thrust of Miosz Bembinow’s Sonnet 129 make a welcome contrast to the many more contemplative responses, of which Krzesimir Dębski’s Sonnet 1 – an enchanting opener with more than a hint of Vaughan Williams’s Shakespeare settings – is easily the pick of the bunch.

If you want to revisit Shakespeare’s sonnets you’d do better to pick up a copy while listening to one of proMODERN’s other, superb recordings.