American composer Dan Locklair has by now carved out a secure niche as a composer of appealing music, especially in the choral and organ genres, and his music has received a generally warm welcome in these pages. The present disc of choral music will yield no surprises to anyone familiar with this composer’s oeuvre, but will be a welcome addition to the collection of any enthusiast of fine choral writing.

The works include both accompanied and unaccompanied chorus, a choral cycle for the latter forces opening the proceedings with an upbeat and life-affirming Sing to the World, the title of which is borrowed for the name of the entire disc. Its five poems encompass settings of the work of four Americans (Walt Whitman, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Phillis Wheatley, and Henry Van Dyke) and the Spaniard Tomás Iriarte in English translation. Each poem explores some aspect of music, and the largely homophonic writing makes a glorious impression, given the rich texture made possible by skilled divisi writing.

The next work adds piano accompaniment, and has the rather novel approach of calling upon the chorus to hum during portions of the instrumental introduction. The work, entitled For This is Love, is a gentle and exquisite setting of Robert Frost’s poem “A Prayer in Spring.” Choral writing simply does not get any more beautiful than this, something I could say as well about the other works on the disc, each of which gives audible testimony to Locklair’s compositional gifts in writing for the choral medium. I can heartily give the entire recital a warm recommendation, given the skill of the chorus and its director Adam Whitmore, who succeeds in creating not only a good blend of voices and accurate intonation, but also a fair amount of understandability of the texts being sung, no small feat given the declining aural abilities of this aging reviewer.