Bruno Coulais said in 2001 that he wanted to concentrate less on film music and pursue his contemporary classical career. A year later came the blockbuster soundtrack for the French art film Les choristes, which thrust him to major prominence as a film composer. His Stabat mater, premiered at the Festival de Saint-Denis in 2005, from which this recording is taken, is the composer keeping his earlier promise.

Rather than focusing on the suffering of Mary during Christ’s crucifixion, Coulais inserts a contemporary theme, citing a 1997 massacre in Algeria. The Stabat mater is inspired by a celebrated press photograph, known as the ‘Madonna of Bentalha’, which shows an Algerian mother weeping for her dead son.

There is a deliberate collision between the modern and the ancient, the contemporary voice and the traditional sitting uncomfortably together. Arabic chant, rock and minimalist repetition coexist in a series of vignettes. These impacts spark off moments of beauty, as in the ‘Dolente’ and ‘Fac ut portem Christi mortem’.

Coulais is most convincing in the Mikrokosmos Chamber Choir sections and using the gruff, ‘street’ voices of Robert Wyatt and Guillaume Depardieu. But elsewhere the structure fails and the music becomes an incoherent collection of loose ideas that sound like film-music excerpts. The recording is also very forward and somewhat harsh. Sections with electronically manipulated voices tend to recede out of the live recording and into the studio, giving the impression of a melange of concert and studio recording.

Ultimately this is a frustrating production. It hints at greater things to come, but only if Coulais does less to please a commercial audience and instead follows his more esoteric instincts.