Anonymous 4 have announced that the 2015-16 season will be their last. This is a source of great regret to those of us who have enjoyed the ensemble’s interpretations of music from the early reaches of the vocal repertoire. This new disc offers something different, but not always so radically different as you might imagine. The American composer David Lang, who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for The Little Match Girl Passion, has now written Love Fail, a sequence of 14 reflections on love’s trials, pains and (occasionally) joys, mainly unaccompanied save for sporadic bells and with a brief instrumental break between Nos 9 and 11. Anonymous 4 gave the work’s premiere in New Haven, Connecticut, in 2012.

Prompted by the story of Tristan and Isolde, Lang has adapted texts by various writers through the ages (Gottfried von Strassburg, Thomas Malory and Wagner among them), stripped them down and interspersed them with pithy expositions on tiffs, misunderstandings and other hazards that bestrew the path of true love by the American writer Lydia Davis. Lang’s understanding of medieval vocal writing comes through in the rhythmic bite of such numbers as ‘Dureth’ (No 3), overlaid, as elsewhere, with his contemporary harmonic palette and consistently testifying to his appreciation of the voice’s natural expressive potential, whether solo or as a quartet. With its mix of simplicity and complexity, Love Fail is both haunting and thought-provoking.