In a programme on Wednesday strangely entitled The English Pastoral Tradition, only one work was given truly chamber-choir treatment.

A mere 22 voices, fewer than a third of the University Chamber Choir’s full complement, were needed for George Haynes’s freshly-minted Missa Pangue Lingua.

The composer had clearly put his tenure as a York Minster choral scholar to good use. The melody of the 13th century hymn for Corpus Christi provided the basis for his effective double-choir setting.

A forceful Kyrie and an almost equally muscular Gloria preceded a more reverential second half that culminated in flexible choral chanting in the Agnus Dei. Idiomatic for voices, its spare harmonies tinted with mild dissonances, the work suggests a composer of considerable potential.

The first half of the evening was rather more boisterous. Under Peter Seymour’s direction, the singers all too frequently reached a fortissimo that was almost overpowering, out of scale for this hall.

Soloists struggled for ascendancy in Tippett’s five spirituals from A Child of Our Time and it was only in the Agnus Dei of Vaughan Williams’s Mass in G minor that we finally experienced a genuine full-choir pianissimo. Good it was, too.

Robert Pearsall’s long-limned madrigal Lay a Garland (1840), after the Haynes, brought a change of mood. Ideal, in fact, for the beautiful restraint shown in Howells’s Requiem. Sensitivity to balance and tuning was exemplary here. The programme’s title? English, yes. Pastoral, hardly. The two are not synonymous.