VoxCarnyx

St Aloysius Church, Glasgow

English court composer John Sheppard died during a flu epidemic in the winter of 1558, some 430 years before the birth of Edinburgh-based composer Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade, who is still in her mid-30s. Both, however, sat very comfortably in the Dunedin Consort’s startlingly diverse programme of choral works for Lent.

Associate Director of the Dunedin, tenor Nicholas Mulroy – who was conducting and not singing for this concert – may have devised a programme that should win accolades for its diversity alone. Although it was built around the four motets Francis Poulenc wrote as he rediscovered his Catholic faith on the eve of the Second World War, featured two movements from the Mass Benjamin Britten’s right-hand woman Imogen Holst wrote as a student, and was liberally sprinkled with Renaissance polyphony, it also contrived to include five living composers, four of them women, and a Marian hymn by a Portuguese musician reckoned to be the first black composer to have his work published.

The “rediscovery” of Vicente Lusitano may not have been big news in Lisbon, where that happened 50 years ago, but the rest of Europe is now catching up and his Sancta Maria proved a fascinatingly dense and complex work, sung by a sextet drawn from the ranks of the 16-strong choir. A similar approach of one voice to a part was employed with quintets for Orlando Lassus and William Byrd, and – at a stretch – for Anna Meredith’s affecting and highly original Heal You, performed by a female trio and at times reminiscent of the wonderful Roche sisters.

It followed Canadian Sarah MacDonald’s Crux Fidelis, a work whose intricacy was both textual and musical with the men and women swapping roles as singers of the Latin text and the English poetry of Emily Dickinson and Elizabethan “Dark Lady” Emilia Lanier. The Byrd was followed by Cruttwell-Reade’s The Dead, a setting of Don Paterson’s version of a Rilke sonnet on which the ink is barely dry, and whose harmonies other choirs will surely lap up eagerly.

The distinctive musical dialect of the Poulenc and James MacMillan’s Miserere gave this ensemble plenty of chewy stuff to display their chops, and the Holst, Sheppard, William Gibbons setting of Fletcher’s Drop, Drop Slow Tears  and William Henry Harris’s of John Donne’s prayer Bring Us, O Lord God showed their command of more ‘mainstream’ repertoire.

The other new gem in the concert was also a John Donne setting, his masterly sonnet At The Round Earth’s Imagin’d Corners given superbly complementary musical life by Cheryl Frances-Hoad. Giving the sopranos a bit of r’n’r, her ATB voicing, in unison and deceptively simple harmonies, proved a masterclass in sensitivity to rhyme scheme and rhythm.

As well as being the architect of this clever sequence of works, Mulroy was in eloquent command of its musical performance. At the Glasgow one, however, he chose to present it in artificial groups of three pieces, solely to control the applause, and regardless of stage management realities. It was an unfortunate decision, and letting the audience do its own thing, or – even better – asking it to hold back until the end of each half, was really what his thoughtfully-compiled recital deserved.

Repeated at Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh on Friday March 28, Dundee St Mary’s Parish Church on Saturday 29 and Aberdeen’s Cowdray Hall on Sunday 30.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Nicholas Mulroy by Jen Owens