The first thing one notices about this new release from The Crossing is the sheer beauty of tone of the choir’s 24 voices. Theirs is a wonderfully euphonious ensemble, each voice complementing the others, evident from the first bar of the first track, ‘The Sense of the Past’. I dare say that they could sing a shopping list and sound heavenly; in Gavin Bryars’s extended cantata A Native Hill (2018-19) they have music of extraordinary loveliness, which they sing superbly.

Bryars and The Crossing have history, of course, their previous collaboration, The Fifth Century (ECM, 2014), having been awarded the 2015 Grammy for Best Choral Performance. A Native Hill is a meditative sequence of 12 motet-like movements setting excerpts from Wendell Berry’s influential environmentally minded essay of the same name (in truth, as much prose poem as essay). The movement titles encapsulate the sense of landscape, emotional or otherwise: ‘The Pool’; ‘The Road’; ‘Topsoil’; the beautifully flowing ‘The Music of Streams’. The cantata, which at times feels almost like a Mass setting, has a specifically personal resonance for the composer, as its gestation mirrored that of his granddaughter Cassia, during which her father (Bryars’s son-in-law), Julian Rockey, died. It may be simplistic to hear this loss reflected in the final two movements, ‘Shadow’ and ‘At Peace’, but there is barely concealed anguish in the music.

A Native Hill may not have the exceptional emotive force of Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet (10/93) or the hypnotic power of The Sinking of the Titanic (2/95) but is in my view musically stronger than either of those celebrated predecessors. Navona’s recording, made at St Peter’s Church in the Great Valley, Malvern, Pennsylvania, is faithful and clear, the strong acoustic perfectly suited to Bryars’s rich, charged harmonies and interweaving lines. Navona’s documentation credits John Grecia (keyboards) and Kevin Vondrack (assistant conductor), presumably during rehearsals of this a cappella masterpiece.