If the name Penelope Thwaites is familiar it’s probably as a pianist. Australian-born, London-based Thwaites has recorded extensively and is best known for her major contribution to Chandos’s 19-disc Grainger Edition. But it’s as a composer that she appears here in a recital that pairs her choral works and solo songs, all presented by an enticing roster of performers.

Anyone who has heard Thwaites’s John Wesley-inspired 1976 musical Ride! Ride! will know the composer’s skill at pastiche. But what was a strength in the context of the many magpie numbers of a stage show here prevents us getting much of a sense of a coherent voice.

The songs, performed variously and excellently by Carolyn Sampson, James Gilchrist and William Dazeley, share the world of Quilter or Butterworth – rueful, nostalgic, intensely English. Thwaites is good at drawing-room sentimentality and wryness, and both ‘Forestry’ and ‘Reverie’ as well as a set of Shakespeare Songs for chorus and soloists see her at her best. A wonderfully earthy, almost Falstaffian ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun’ from Dazeley banishes memories of Finzi in its contrasting spirit, while ‘O mistress mine’ and ‘It was a lover’ have the lean-back lightness of revue numbers.

The biggest piece included is the concise Missa brevis, which nods to Rubbra in its brooding, modal character, but which – as with all the sacred choral music here – ultimately defaults to a rather conventional, early 19th-century style. The triptych of travel-inspired choral songs India – Australia – Africa with their self-conscious exoticisms teeters dangerously close to African Sanctus territory, and despite strong performances from Ex Cathedra and the soloists this doesn’t quite add up to a coherent listen.