The fragility of life, the certainty of death and man’s love of expressing grief and seeking solace: these are the things which loosely thread anelegiac recital from Tallis to Bach – except that the music moves chronologically backwards. On paper, it looks a hotch-potch but iit works because Matthew White and his colleagues are finely attuned to the diverse effects of a single ‘conceit’: that of reflective melancholy. Conceived around German and English music, White displays a notable expressive range in his light, clean and soft-grained falsetto. If less fruity than Andreas Scholl, electric than David Daniels or mesmerising and distinctive as Robin Blaze or James Bowman, he has an agreeable timbre which allows you to forget the vocal apparatus and concentrate on the music.

Whether Bach’s famous solo bass cantata, Ich habe genug, works in this tessitura is questionable and it reveals White’s line at its least comfortable. (I must also take issue with the self-consciously bulgy oboe phrasing in the opening aria.) Yet Johann Christoph Bach’s Ach, das ich Wassers – a rite of passage for countertenors – receives an highly intelligent and powerful reading, playing less on the common tendency to grind to a treacly halt, and more towards a luminous commentary with rhythmic as well as textural character. White brings the same level of atmosphere to the English pieces (apart from Ye sacred muses which, compared to Deller on Vanguard – 4/95, sadly nla – seems almost glib) although diction is not always as clear as it could be.

Les Voix Baroque are excellent throughout, as accompanists and on their own in the striking instrumental laments by Biber and Schmelzer. Both performances are richly-shaded and in the latter’s Lament on the death of Emperor Ferdinand III, they provide an alternative reading to the resonant drama of the Freiburg Baroque Consort’s distinguished account of 1995. Canada is producing some fine countertenors at present and Matthew White is the admirable protagonist in one of the best Analekta releases to date. A warm recommendation.