Chamber Choir Ireland, Esposito Quartet / Paul Hillier (dir)

Louth Contemporary Music Society Digital Release ★★★★

The three pieces on this album were all premiered at Louth Contemporary Music Society’s midsummer festival 2023. (That’s the small town of Louth in the Republic of Ireland, just west of Dundalk.) They reflect the meticulously-punctuated theme of that edition of the festival: the idea that new music in the western classical tradition belongs to us all, but because we are all different, with no common heritage, the continuity implicit in the notion of tradition is not always recognised.

Cassandra Millar’s The City, Full of People is inspired by Tallis’s Lamentations, written in the 1560s; six small groups of singers perform just one line of its text, set using similar harmonies but an expanded timeframe, creating what the composer calls a ‘cacophony of private secrets’. This was probably very atmospheric in live performance but the later recording in a Dublin chapel does not capture the sense of different groups very clearly.

A string quartet by Laurence Crane, referencing both the idioms of classical chamber music and the in/out breath required to play a mouth organ, separates Miller’s piece from another a cappella choral work, Linda Catlin Smith’s poignant Folio, setting some of the poems that Emily Dickinson scribbled on the backs of envelopes. Performed by Chamber Choir Ireland with great assurance, this stood up well to the clunky process of listening to digital downloads on a desktop computer.

This review originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Choir & Organ magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe today