As a former Swingle Singer and currently artistic director and principal conductor of the National Youth Choirs of Great Britain, Ben Parry knows better than almost anyone what works for young voices, what they enjoy singing and how to get the best out of them. You can hear the results clearly in this collection of his own choral music, efficiently recorded here by Rupert Gough and The Choir of Royal Holloway.

To say that this is a disc of highly functional choral music isn’t to damn with faint praise, rather to highlight Parry’s priorities and the practical understanding that shapes his composition. Anthems are, broadly, compact and easily within the grasp of a church choir’s rehearsal time; secular works are often homophonic or written with the unobtrusive support of piano accompaniment. Many are commissions from youth choirs or school groups, and you can hear in works such as Snow and Parry’s setting of the New Year Carol how effectively he deploys simple textures and devices to strong dramatic effect.

Text is king in Parry’s sensitive, pastel-coloured settings, which follow the descriptive contours of verse with careful attention. The composer’s taste for rather Victorian texts (and I include living poet and regular collaborator Garth Bardsley in that) can make for a rather perfumed, cloying sweetness, especially when allied to Parry’s ingenuous, American-style tonal language, but the effect is glossy and polished and the works always well crafted.

Gough’s singers revel in the wide, arching phrases and word-painting Parry offers them, though you can’t help feeling that the men get the short end of the straw in settings that so often leave the melody to the top line, using the lower voices for support and ballast.

I’m not sure the disc works as a recital but as a resource for choral directors it will be invaluable.